Former President Donald Trump derided Vice President Kamala Harris during their presidential debate for supposedly “going with my philosophy” on U.S. trade with China, saying he wanted to send her a “MAGA hat.” Then he called the Democratic nominee a “Marxist.”
“Her father’s a Marxist professor in economics,” Trump said of Donald Harris, the first Black professor in Stanford’s economics department to be granted tenure. “And he taught her well.”
That’s news to Stanford economist Peter Blair Henry. Over the last two decades, he and the elder Harris have worked together to advise the government of Jamaica, their shared homeland, on how to harness free markets to attack poverty and address the country’s previously crippling public debt.
Henry, dean emeritus of NYU’s Stern Business School and a board member at Citigroup and Nike, said most would characterize him as a pragmatic center-right economist, or perhaps a so-called “Blue Dog Democrat.”
“Donald Harris is of that same ilk,” he said, at least in terms of their work with the Jamaican government. Harris, who has rarely spoken to media during his daughter’s political career, did not return a request for comment.
Critics of Donald Harris may point out that his academic work was intensely theoretical and critiqued mainstream economics from the left. There is also a 48-year-old assessment in Stanford’s student newspaper that describes him as a “Marxist scholar” who some faculty members considered “too charismatic, a pied piper leading students astray from neoclassical economics.”
Harris’s early academic leanings, however, don’t appear to have informed his work for the Jamaican government later in life. No matter the party in power, Henry said, he and Harris have consistently urged the country’s decision makers to reduce red tape for entrepreneurs, attract foreign investment, ensure low and stable inflation, and reduce the nation’s debt.
“These are constant themes that we both emphasize,” said Henry. “How do you make Jamaica the most business friendly, as well as family friendly, place in the Caribbean?”
He and Harris’s policy recommendations, he said, reflect what economists have dubbed the Washington Consensus. The term refers to a set of free-market reforms that James A. Baker, then Treasury secretary under Ronald Reagan, said developing countries should adopt to reestablish themselves as creditworthy.
Those policy norms included an openness to trade. Trump, by contrast, has proposed a 10% worldwide tariff and a 60% tariff on all Chinese goods. Henry said he believes free trade has been critical in lifting over 1 billion people out of poverty since 1990, according to numbers from the United Nations.
“The world is sort of in danger of killing the goose that laid the golden eggs,” he said.
Some allies consider the elder Harris’s work instrumental in Jamaica entering a successful deal with the International Monetary Fund and regaining access to international capital markets. A recent paper coauthored by Henry explores how the country cut its debt from 144% of GDP at the end of 2012 to 72% by 2023.
The country’s recent fiscal discipline has some calling the island the “Caribbean Germany.” Alternatively, Henry sees a path for Jamaica to become the “Caribbean Singapore,” a potential transformation powered by taking advantage of geography and strategic investments in education and infrastructure.
A legacy that begins in Jamaica
This broader perspective of the senior Harris’s career, though, didn’t appear to inform Trump’s comments as he tried to paint his opponent as a radical leftist, using what the Washington Post called a “ridiculous slur.” The vice president’s economic proposals are generally regarded as moderate Democratic ideas, though her call to ban “price gouging on food and groceries” has been widely panned by economists (the Post’s editorial board accused her of presenting “populist gimmicks”).
Meanwhile, the Democratic nominee has been endorsed by more than 90 major company executives, including the former CEOs of Pepsi, Ford, and Yahoo, as well as more than 700 venture capitalists. She was primarily raised by her mother, Shyamala Gopalan Harris, who divorced her husband in 1971.
The vice president maintains strong ties to Jamaica, as does Henry. His parents met at what is now the University of the West Indies, the island’s flagship university, just a few years before the country gained its independence from British rule in 1962. His father hailed from a rural area in the southwest of the island, and, like his future wife, had earned a scholarship to become the first member of his family to attend college. They would both go on to earn PhDs from the Illinois Institute of Technology and University of Chicago, respectively.
“The campus was just sort of teeming with ambitious, bright, hungry young people who wanted to make a difference,” said Henry, the youngest person ever appointed to lead NYU’s business school.
When Henry became a professor at Stanford in the late 1990s, his father didn’t tell him that his college roommate, Donald Harris—who had come from a similar background in Jamaica’s north—taught in the same department. Harris eventually made the connection after a faculty member introduced the pair because of their shared interest in economic development.
Born and raised in Jamaica until the age of 9, Henry witnessed what he described as an “economic calamity” on the island in the 1970s. His family emigrated after an ambitious socialist program left the country poorer and heavily indebted.
He recalled being struck by what looked to him like uniform prosperity when he arrived at his new suburban home in Illinois. That contrast, he said, sparked his interest in economics.
Unfortunately, Henry’s father died soon after the economist began significantly collaborating with Harris. The work of his son and undergraduate roommate, however, might outlive them all.
