Ganja feud
After she declared her candidacy for president in 2019, Dr. Harris proceeded to offer economic policy advice to the campaign. But he became angry a month later when the candidate told a radio show host that she supported legalizing marijuana and then added, “Half my family’s from Jamaica, are you kidding me?”
Dr. Harris issued a statement, denouncing as a “travesty” his daughter’s promotion of “the fraudulent stereotype of a pot-smoking joy seeker.” The father “took umbrage,” said Mr. Hutchinson, Dr. Harris’s friend, “because his family was blasting him for his offspring having embarrassed them in this way.”
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He enjoys tooling around in his silver Corvette.
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Both in essays and in the classroom, Dr. Harris argued that market economies should be inclusive rather than monopolistic. Some of his scholarly papers analyzed Marxist economic thinking, but by the early 1990s, “he had become more realistic, because he’d learned along the way,” said Anne Krueger, a conservative economist and fellow Stanford professor at the time. “He certainly had more faith in government than some of us did. But among the people I knew as Marxian economists, he was not there.”
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In the mid-90s, Dr. Harris took an early retirement from Stanford to return to Jamaica and coordinate what would become known as the country’s national industrial policy. That effort, which sought to transform a national economy fueled by debt into one sustained by an export-based model through public and private partnerships, took more than a decade for the financially hobbled government to put in place.
Once the policy did take hold, roughly a decade ago, the economy’s ratio of debt to gross domestic product was halved. The unemployment rate fell from 15 percent in 2013 to 5.4 percent today. “The national industrial policy was anathema to Marxists,” said P.J. Patterson, Jamaica’s prime minister at the time. “What Don was propounding was the notion of a market-based economy where the private sector, not the government, was the engine of growth. There was nothing in there about state control of industry.”
oof!