James Stemble Duesenberry
James S. Duesenberry, William Joseph Maier Professor of Money and Banking, Emeritus, and a member of the Harvard Economics Department for more than half a century, died on October 5, 2009. We miss him. Jim’s spirit of curious but skeptical intellectual inquiry, of willingness to pitch in when work needed to be done, and of concern for making both Harvard University and the world at large a better place – all with wit and humor, and a wealth of engaging stories that he loved to tell – influenced for the better this university and many of the people who comprise it. A native of West Virginia, Jim Duesenberry studied economics at the University of Michigan and came to Harvard in 1946 with his wartime military service in the Pacific behind him and his Ph.D. dissertation already well along. The resulting book, Income, Saving, and the Theory of Consumer Behavior, published in...