Marjorie S. Turner

Marjorie Shepherd Turner (December 12, 1921 – March 29, 2021) was an American economist and biographer. A labor economist at San Diego State University from 1954 to 1976, where she headed the economics department and directed the Institute of Labor Economics, she later wrote intellectual biographies of the Cambridge economists Joan Robinson and Nicholas Kaldor: Joan Robinson and the Americans (1989) and Nicholas Kaldor and the Real World (1993).

Early life and education

Marjorie Shepherd was born on December 12, 1921, in Beaumont, Texas, one of three daughters of Albert Edward Shepherd, an entrepreneur, and Mabel (Winne) Shepherd, a pianist and seamstress. She graduated with high honors from the University of Texas at Austin in 1943, where she was elected to Phi Beta Kappa, and received an MA there in 1945 with a thesis on the forerunners of John Maynard Keynes's General Theory. An early marriage ended in divorce, and she raised a son as a single parent while a graduate student at Texas into the early 1950s.

Career

Turner taught economics as an instructor at the University of Texas from 1947 to 1952 and at the University of Arizona in Tucson from 1952. In 1954 she received her PhD from the University of Texas, with a dissertation titled "The Industrial Pattern of Mexican-American Employment in Nueces County, Texas", and became an associate dean at San Diego State College. She joined its economics faculty in 1956, was head of the department from 1967 to 1969, and directed its Institute of Labor Economics from 1970 to 1974. She retired as professor emerita in 1976.

Most of her early publications were in labor economics. They included Women and Work (1964), published by the Institute of Industrial Relations at the University of California, and several studies issued by the San Diego State Institute of Labor Economics. With J. W. Leasure she wrote Prices, Production, and Profit: How Much Is Enough? (1974).

The Cambridge controversy

In 1963 Turner and her husband took sabbaticals at the University of Cambridge, where she attended lectures by Joan Robinson, Nicholas Kaldor and Richard Kahn at the height of the Cambridge capital controversy between the Cambridge, England, Keynesians and the American economists Robert Solow, Kenneth Arrow and Paul Samuelson. The experience led to two articles on the debate: "Wages in the Cambridge Theory of Distribution" (1966) and "A Comparison of Some Aspects of the Cambridge Theory of Wages and Marginal Productivity Theory" (1967).

Biographies of Robinson and Kaldor

After her husband retired in 1974, the couple sailed a cruising yacht to New Zealand and spent two and a half years in the South Pacific. On their return in 1976 she formally retired, and they settled in the Oregon Cascades, where she read Robinson's complete works in preparation for a biography.

Joan Robinson and the Americans (M. E. Sharpe, 1989) traces Robinson's family background and early years, the controversy with Edward Chamberlin over The Economics of Imperfect Competition, her conversion to Keynesian economics and the influence of Michał Kalecki, her relationship to Marxist thought, The Accumulation of Capital, the Cambridge capital controversy, and her relations with American economists and the post-Keynesian movement. In researching it Turner drew on Robinson's papers in the archives of King's College, Cambridge, and interviewed Robinson's husband Austin Robinson, Geoffrey Harcourt, Frank Hahn, Sukhamoy Chakravarty and others in Cambridge, as well as American economists including Samuelson, Solow, John Kenneth Galbraith, Juliet Schor, Paul Davidson and Alfred Eichner. James and Julianne Cicarelli describe its account of Robinson's early life as the most detailed available in print. The book was reviewed in the Journal of Economic Issues and the Journal of the History of Economic Thought.

Nicholas Kaldor and the Real World (M. E. Sharpe, 1993) drew its biographical framework from A. P. Thirlwall's 1987 biography of Kaldor and concentrated on his application of economic theory to policy, from his conversion from laissez-faire to Keynesian economics to his critique of equilibrium economics. It was reviewed by Johan Deprez in the Journal of Economic Issues.

Turner also contributed "Joan Robinson: Why Not a Nobel Laureate?" to The Joan Robinson Legacy (1991), edited by Ingrid H. Rima.

Personal life and death

In 1961 she married Merle Brandt Turner, a professor of psychology at San Diego State. After retiring she continued to sail, from the Great Lakes to the Gulf of Mexico, and in 2003 published a memoir, The Sailing Life. The Cicarellis described her as "a practicing humanist, an ardent institutionalist, and a lapsed Methodist" who had "made a career of being a rebel with a cause". She died on March 29, 2021.

Selected works

• Women and Work. Los Angeles: Institute of Industrial Relations, University of California, 1964.
• "Wages in the Cambridge Theory of Distribution". Industrial and Labor Relations Review 19 (3), April 1966: 390–401.
• "A Comparison of Some Aspects of the Cambridge Theory of Wages and Marginal Productivity Theory". Journal of Economic Issues 1 (3), September 1967: 189–198.
• (with J. W. Leasure) Prices, Production, and Profit: How Much Is Enough? Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1974.
• Joan Robinson and the Americans. Armonk, N.Y.: M. E. Sharpe, 1989.
• Nicholas Kaldor and the Real World. Armonk, N.Y.: M. E. Sharpe, 1993.

Further reading

• "Turner, Marjorie S." Contemporary Authors, vol. 145. Detroit: Gale Research, 1995, pp. 463–464.