In Memory of John Murray

This post is a bit different than normal. Most of my posts are about the minutiae of economic theory or controversies. Today’s post is personal. All of us in academia have a number of important people who have helped us in our intellectual journey and career. I have been fortunate enough to have a number of such people in my short career. One of these people was John Murray.

I first met John as an undergraduate. At the time I was a history major, but I had started to take an interest in economics. I went to see John in his office, he being the undergraduate adviser at that time. We had not met before that day. In fact, I could not have taken more than 3 courses in economics at that time. I remember that he was delighted that I was interested in economics given that I was currently a history major. After all, John was an economic historian. When I took John’s course in economic history, it really opened my eyes to thinking about history in a completely different way. I could tell, even then, that he really enjoyed the unique perspective that economists brought to the study of history. He also had a dry sense of humor that I enjoyed.

John and I always kept in touch. When I accepted my job at the University of Mississippi, John had just accepted his position as the J. R. Hyde III Professor of Political Economy at Rhodes College. He thought that it was funny that we had accepted jobs just an hour drive from another. After we moved, I invited John down here to give seminars and he invited me up there to give a seminar. The last few years, he made a habit of coming down to Oxford to have lunch with me about twice a year. While these were technically lunches, we would often chat for a couple of hours when he would visit. We would talk about our kids and our research and he would always give me advice. We would also talk about the craziest economic theories that we thought might be correct. He also loved that I had recently taken an interest in applying modern macro to historical events. At our last lunch together in October, he was especially excited to talk about how I’d recently been given tenure and how much I had accomplished from that day I initially met him in his office.

I say this was our last lunch because John died last Tuesday. He was 58 years old.

John was not only a great mentor, but an excellent scholar. John’s work on the communes of the religious group known as the Shakers is an important work on the role of incentives in the context of particular institutional environments and should be a staple of law and economics courses. He also wrote a fascinating book on an early form of health insurance in the U.S., industrial sickness funds. He was also on the editorial board of the Journal of Economic History and Explorations in Economic History. His Google Scholar page is here. I imagine that all scholars want their work to be remembered fondly. So hopefully readers will pursue some of these links.

John was one of the most genuinely nice people that you could ever meet and he had a great laugh. He was the first person in his family to go to college and once upon a time he was a high school math teacher. Having grown up in Cincinnati, he was also a Reds fan, which I am proud to say I never held against him. His Rhodes webpage has a really great description of his life and his research in his own words, which can be found here.

The last interaction I had with John was through email a couple of weeks ago. I had sent him one of my latest papers and he told me that he was really excited to read it and discuss it. Our next lunch would have been planned for the next month or so. I wish now that I’d scheduled it sooner. I miss those lunches already. All I can hope is that John is somewhere saving me a seat for our next lunch.