| John R. Meyer | |
| Birth Name: | John Robert Meyer |
| School Tradition: | New economic history |
| Birth Date: | December 6, 1927 |
| Birth Place: | Pasco, Washington, United States |
| Death Place: | Cambridge, Massachusetts, United States |
| Institution: | Harvard University |
| Alma Mater: | University of Washington |
| Doctoral Advisor: | Guy Orcutt James Duesenberry |
| Doctoral Students: | Franklin M. Fisher Thomas J. Sargent |
| Influences: | Alexander Gerschenkron John Lintner |
| Contributions: | Transport economics Pioneer of cliometrics |
| Spouse: | Lee Stowell (m. 1949-2003) |
| Children: | 3 |
John Robert Meyer (December 6, 1927 – October 20, 2009) was an American economist and educator. Meyer is credited with creating the field of transport economics and was one of the pioneers of cliometrics.[1]
Born in Pasco, Meyer attended Pacific University from 1945 to 1946, after which he served in the United States Naval Reserve from 1945 to 1948. He received his Bachelor of Arts from the University of Washington in 1950, and a doctorate from Harvard University in 1955.[2] His dissertation topic (business investment decisions) coincided with that of a Harvard classmate, Edwin Kuh, leading them to merge both papers and publish it as The Investment Decision: An Empirical Study in 1957.[3]
Meyer was a professor at Harvard's Department of Economics from 1955 to 1968, and then at Yale University from 1968 to 1973. He returned to the Cambridge in 1973 as a professor at the Harvard Business School until 1983. He served as president of the National Bureau of Economic Research from 1967 to 1977. Meyer was a consultant to the National Transportation Policy Study Commission from 1977 to 1979. He served as vice chairman and board member of Union Pacific Railroad. From 1996 to 1998, Meyer served as co-interim director of Harvard's Joint Center for Housing Studies, along with Gerald McCue. Meyer chaired their faculty committee from 1997 to 2003.
He ended his career at Harvard as the James W. Harpel Professor of Capital Formation and Economic Growth Emeritus at the Harvard Kennedy School. The Joint Center for Housing Studies named a dissertation fellowship in Meyer's honor.[4]
Meyer and three co-authors (Merton Peck, John Stenason and Charles Zwick) published The Economics of Competition in the Transportation Industries in 1959. This book conducted a thorough analysis of costs and demand, which enabled the authors to study what the railroad industry might look like if it were better governed. Regulation of railroads had implicitly given incentivizes to passenger over freight trains. This made railroads less efficient and less profitable because intercity rail’s great comparative advantage was moving goods over long distances. They are now credited with creating the field of transport economics. Meyer's second influential book on the topic was The Urban Transportation Problem, co-authored with John F. Kain and Martin Wohl. The book describes the process of American suburbanization and the rapid switch from public transportation to cars.
Meyer was also a pioneer of cliometrics. In 1958, he and fellow Harvard professor Alfred H. Conrad published The Economics of Slavery in the Antebellum South in the Journal of Political Economy. Using rigorous statistics, the authors concluded that the view that slavery in the United States would have disappeared without the American Civil War, as claimed by Charles W. Ramsdell, Ulrich Bonnell Phillips, and other historians is not supported by evidence. This anticipated the study by Robert Fogel, who later arrived at the same conclusion.
In 1949, Meyer married Lee Stowell, and they had three children: Leslie Karen; Ann Elizabeth; and Robert Conrad. In 2009, Meyer died on October 20 after a long battle with Parkinson's disease.[5]