Walter Lippmann: The Making of a Public Economist

Abstract

Walter Lippmann was the most respected American journalist of the twentieth century. During the Great Depression and World War II he devoted most of his thrice-weekly columns in the New York Herald Tribune to exploring the causes of recession and the economics of war. He was a student of George Santayana and William James, as well as of Frank Taussig and Thomas Nixon Carver at Harvard, and his heart was in literature and the arts as much as in the social sciences and current events. He spanned the academic world, where he made distinguished contributions, publishing a book on public opinion, serving in government where he was involved at the highest levels, and working in the private sector in which he had close friends. He adopted the macroeconomics of his close friend John Maynard Keynes, and he became best known for his warning against the dangers in the spread of monopoly and economic planning in The Good Society.