(1912-2002)Ìý
by Chris Green
Earl Beach, Professor Emeritus of Economics, died on Friday, May 17, 2002, at the age of 90. Earl was born in Chicago in 1912, the nephew of J.L. Kraft of Kraft Food fame. After his father died during the flue epidemic of 1917-18, his mother returned with her four children to the family farm near Fort Erie Ontario. There, Earl attended a one room schoolhouse. After undergraduate work at Queens University, Earl went on to Harvard University where he received his Ph.D. in Economics in 1938.
In the late 1930's, there were brief teaching stints at Queen's University, Radcliffe College, Harvard University, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and City College of New York. In 1940, Earl came to Ï㽶ÊÓƵ as an Assistant Professor. In 1943, he was promoted to Associate Professor, and then to a Full Professorship in 1946. Except for Visiting Professorships at th University of Minnesota and Ohio State University in the spring terms of 1957 and 1966, respectively, Earl remained at McGill until 1983. Earl's 43 years at McGill is unmatched by any member of the Department of Economics, not even by Stephen Leacock.
At the age of 71, Earl retired to the Kitchener-Waterloo area of Ontario with his second wife Lila Willis, his first wife, Katherine, having died in 1979. Earl is survived by his wife Lila, who also is a McGill retiree, and by a daughter Elizabeth and son Charles, a Professor of Economics at Queens University.
When Earl came to McGill in 1940, he was immediately made Director of the School of Commerce, the predecessor of the Faculty of Management. Earl retained his directorship until 1946, after which all of his attention was focused on the Department of Economics and Political Science (as it was then). Earl served as Chair of the Department from 1951 to 1953, and as Chair of the Social Science Council of Canada from 1958-60.
Earl's major fields of teaching were Economic Statistics and Econometrics. In the l 980's, he was still teaching Economic Statistics to 200 or more students in the Department's Majors program. Earl also had a strong interest in economic theory.
In 1957, Earl published Economic Models, an Exposition, one of the earliest books on model-building in economics. This pioneering study examined the then nascent and now pervasive practice of modeling economic behaviour mathematically and estimating it statistically. An Italian translation of the book followed soon after. It is noteworthy that Economic Models, an Exposition was listed in the Encyclopedia Britanica's entry on "Econometrics", in the 1960's, alongside a select handful of similar works, including ones by Jan Tinberg and Lawrence Klein, both of them winners of the Nobel Prize in Economics.
Earl had a lifetime interest in the work of the great English economist Alfred Marshall, and continued to write and present papers on this subject long after he had retired. In 1999, at age 88, Earl self-published his book Progress and Prosperity which set out his thoughts on Marshall. He believed that economic theorists paid much too little attention to the more evolutionary, growth-oriented and dynamic elements of Marshall's work. Earl believed that this lack of attention carried over to the way in which most mainstream economics is pursued, including the way in which economists account for innovation and technological change.
In addition to his lifelong interest in the work of Alfred Marshall, Professor Beach developed, toward the end of his career, a strong interest in the impact of technological change on employment. He argued that labour saving technological change in one industry would, in general, increase labour demand in the economy as a whole, once the effect on other industries is taken into account. To his last days, he remained interested in the study of technological unemployment.
After retiring, Earl took up golf and quickly became good at it. The older he got, the closer his golf score got to his age. By the time he was in his 80's, his golf scores were regularly in the low 80's. When I would ask Earl's son, Charles, how his father was doing, he would simply reply: "fine", he keeps his golf score below his age. Up until a year before his death, Earl would routinely walk the 18 holes four times a week.
Earl will always be remembered as a gentleman. He remained a pleasant and quiet man throughout his long career at Ï㽶ÊÓƵ, including its troubled times. He was a fine colleague, who gave much of himself to the Department, Faculty and University. The Department of Economics and the Faculty of Arts extends its condolences to Lila Willis, and to his son, Charles, and daughter, Elizabeth.