Biographical Memoirs Volume 86 (2005) / Chapter Skim
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D. Gale Johnson
D. Gale Johnson
Pages 228-239
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In his early work he contributed to our knowledge of the sources of instability in national and international commodity markets. In his later work he addressed the sources and consequences of the failure of socialized agriculture in the former Soviet Union and in China.
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Gale Johnson's transfer from lowa State University to the University of Chicago was the result of an incident involving academic fi eedom at lowa State that became known as the "lowa Margarine Incident." At the beginning of World War 11 Iowa State University received a grant from the Rockefeller Foundation to prepare a series of monographs on how to enhance the contribution of agriculture to the war effort. One of these monographs, prepared by O
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When the president of Iowa State acceded to the dairy industry demands,Johnson's mentor Theodore W Schultz, then chairman of the Iowa State Economics Department, resigned and accepted an appointment as professor in the Economics Department at the University of Chicago.
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Gale Johnson has made a series of important scientific and professional contributions that have changed the way economists think about economic instability and economic development. His initial contributions focused on the impact of price instability on the efficiency of resource allocation and use in agriculture.
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Gale insisted that the income problems of agriculture were rooted in disequilibrium in intersector factor markets. This view was articulated most rigorously in an article, "Nature of the Supply Function for Agricultural Products," published in the American Economic Review in 1950, in which he located the failure of agricultural production to adjust to secular growth in agricultural productivity, to instability in commodity prices, and to rigidities in agricultural labor markets.3 The implications for the reform of land tenure institutions were analyzed in a 1950 study, "Resource Allocation Under Share Contracts." This series of studies led Gale Johnson, together with Schultz, to focus major effort on the adjustment problem of Southern agriculture, particularly issues of labor productivity and income distribution.
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, that it is through the factor markets that returns betweer i.l~: -: g ar d other sectors of the ecor only are equalized, that share renting as actually practiced is efficient The primary effect of subsidy programs for agriculture, such as higher paces, is to increase the returns to ar d puce of lar d ar d to expar d agricultural ouqput ar d to ir duce goveruments to interfere with international trade During the 1980s and l990s, issues of agricultural development in the centrally planned economies of the Soviet Union and China occupied a good deal of Johnson's attention. His interest in Soviet agriculture was initially stimulated by an extensive visit to the Soviet Union in 1955 as a member of a U.S.
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In one of the many papers and articles that he wrote on agriculture in the centrally planned economies, he insisted that socialized agriculture had been associated with more human suffering than any human institution other than slavery and war. In the early 1970s, service on the National Commission on Population Growth and the American Future turned Johnson's attention to the relationship between population growth and economic development.
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Gale Johnson to the economics of agriculture. Economic Development and Cultural Change, m press.
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J Farm Econ.
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J Farm Econ.
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Lee, eds. Population Grou th and Economic Development: Issues and Evidence.
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