This post adds to our collection of artifacts filed under “Funny Business”. It is the first example of undergraduate economics humor to have found its way to Economics in the Rear-view Mirror. Somebody inserted a totally fake professor into the part of the yearbook that provided pictures and biographical sketches of distinguished faculty who had taught the 1963 graduating cohort of Radcliffe women.
The fact that I found the artifact in the Radcliffe yearbook of 1963 (p. 92) led me to assume initially that its author was herself a Radcliffe student. Upon examining the credits pages in the yearbook, I noticed that the Radcliffe yearbook apparently was a joint endeavor of Radcliffe women and Harvard men. Now I am not sure if we can ever classify this fake faculty entry genderwise.
The text itself reveals the author(s) knew something about American economic history (the name of the professorship is a play on the 1830 Webster-Hayne Senate debate on protectionist tariffs), the history of economics (Heinrich Schwabe’s 1843 “solar cycle”), and economic policy (the 1954-55 Dixon-Yates controversy). I think we can reasonably conclude that an economics concentrator was involved.
To someone like myself who has transcribed many an economics skit and doggerel, the lame sex joke (game theory applied to promiscuous rabbits) does seem more like a guy-thing than a gal-thing, conditional on having been published in 1963. Perhaps someone out there has a Radcliffe mother/grandmother/aunt (A.B. ca. 1963) who could positively identify EconAnon for us.
P.S. From the yearbook I was only able to identify three graduates of the Radcliffe class of 1963 who were economics concentrators. One of them, Joanne Elizabeth Clifford, listed “yearbook publications” among her activities. According to the July 5, 1973 New York Times, she married Douglas Field Eaton a fellow graduate of Harvard Law School. She was associated with the New York law firm of Debevoise, Plimpton, Lyons & Gates at the time. Maybe Ms. Clifford Eaton could provide a lead, at least she may be presumed to have recognized the joke at the time.
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Sigfried [sic] von Schmidt, the sixty-seven year old Webster A. Hayne Professor of Economics and Moral Philosophy, came to Harvard in 1932 after taking his Ph.D. in economics at the University of Alabama. His Ph.D. thesis, entitled “The Peace Corps and Social Change in Haiti During the Administration of William Henry Harrison,” was later expanded into a fourteen volume work. It is considered the definitive work in its field. Professor von Schmidt teaches Economics 208, “Correlation of Solar Phenomena and Business Cycles,” affectionately known to students as “sun spots and bread lines”.
Professor von Schmidt has varied interests in the field of economics. He is the originator of the marginal income product and was the first person to apply the residual feed-flow back mechanism to the balance of payments. His national stability curve was accepted as an important policy making tool in the autumn of 1929 by the Council of Economic Advisors. He has since expanded the scope of this original work and will soon publish Birth Control and the National Stability Curve.
Professor von Schmidt is also actively engaged in consulting work with a number of quasi-governmental organizations such as the Dixon Yates Power Co. He is also well known for his 1960 Godkin Lecture on “The application of a game theory approach to the problem of promiscuity among rabbits.”
Source: The Radcliffe Yearbook (May, 1963), p. 92.