Remembering Larry Moss

When I attended the special session organized by Bob Dimand and Steven Medema to memorialize Larry Moss at the History of Economics Society meeting in Denver, Colorado on Monday, June 28, 2009, I realized that while I had known Larry well for a few years and had enjoyed his friendship for many years afterward, that my own experience of Larry was quite unique among those who were present at the memorial session. In this memorial, I want to tell a story about different dimensions of Larry's life that I did not hear in the other memorials that I heard that day. Several of those who came to memorialize Larry in Denver were his colleagues in the battle to resurrect, define, and promote Austrian economics, free markets, and entrepreneurship. There were people there who had known Larry as a brash young man at Queen's College in New York City and told wonderful stories of his political tactics and sheer audacity in trying to promote free-market, libertarian ideas in the early 1960s when those ideas were not very popular. There were others who spoke of his time at the University of Virginia and his involvement with public choice theory and the Virginia School. There were also people at the session who described Larry's incessant, energetic enthusiasm for the careers of young Austrians; and this let us all see that Larry had had a special talent for cultivating young scholars who had the same brashness and rough edges that we had heard about in Larry's own youth. I am not sure how best to categorize my own acquaintance with Larry. But what I have to say demonstrates that in addition to Larry's talent for promoting free-market, libertarian ideas and his special gifts as a classroom teacher and magician, he also had a deep and abiding commitment to promoting the history of economic thought that transcended ideology and politics. I am also not sure of how best to characterize my own politics. I do not think that I am as far left on the American political spectrum as Larry was on the right of the American political spectrum. But let it suffice to say that both my parents were union members and I grew up in a blue-collar suburb of Detroit. Thus, while I have always believed that entrepreneurs play an important and irrepressible role in capitalism, I also understand that someone has to work for those entrepreneurs in their factories. I understand those people who work as laborers in the entrepreneurs' factories to be just as irrepressibly a part of capitalism, and I believe that they have important rights and needs that can only be won (and preserved) through collective action. Thus, while I am fascinated by Austrian economics, I find the invisibility of the worker in Austrian economics, other than as an obstacle that must be overcome, to ultimately make it an incomplete expression of how capitalism works. I should also add that I spent the early years of my career, when I knew Larry best, writing about John Maynard Keynes, not someone for whom Austrian economists have a particular fondness. The point of all this is that I might not seem to have been a likely candidate to make a lasting friendship with Larry Moss! We saw the world through quite different lenses and spent our time trying to understand quite different figures in the history of economic thought. But Larry did not initially meet me as a Keynes scholar, a supporter of unions, or a man of the left. Rather he met me as a young man, aged 28, who was passionately interested in the history of economic thought. It was the summer of 1985, and I had just taken my first tenure track job at Simmons College in Boston. I had heard about the Kress Society, which held a monthly seminar in the history of economic thought at the Kress Library at the Harvard Business School, and I had contacted Larry to get information about the society and the seminars. This would have been before the Internet, and I do not know whether I first wrote Larry a letter or whether I telephoned him at Babson College to introduce myself. …