Lorie Tarshis

Who was Lorie Tarshis?

Lorie Tarshis was a Canadian economist who taught mostly at Stanford University. He is credited with writing the first introductory textbook that brought Keynesian thinking into American university classrooms, the 1947 The Elements of Economics. The work swiftly lost popularity after it was charged with excessive sympathy to communism by McCarthyist activists. Instead, the 1948 Economics by Paul Samuelson brought the Keynesian revolution to the United States.

Tarshis was born in Toronto and received a bachelor's degree from the University of Toronto and master's and doctoral degrees in economics from Trinity College, Cambridge.

He came to the United States in 1936 as an instructor at Tufts University near Boston. He worked for the War Production Board in World War II and then became an operations analyst for the United States Army Air Forces at bomber commands in Libya, Tunisia and Italy.

He began teaching at Stanford in 1946, rising from assistant to associate to full professor.

Dr. Tarshis headed the department of economics at Stanford intermittently from 1950 to 1970. He then joined the faculty of Scarborough College, part of the University of Toronto system, and remained there until 1978 as a professor of economics. Until 1988 he was a professor and acting chairman of the department of economics at York University in Ontario.