In Memoriam: Henry Rosovsky, Lewis P and Linda L Geyser University Professor, Emeritus 1927 - 2022

November 15, 2022
Henry Rosovsky by Kris Snibbe

Henry Rosovsky, a member of the Harvard Economics Department since 1966, died on November 11, 2022, at the age of 95. Professor Rosovsky was a titan of academic administration, who had served as Department Chair, Dean of the Faculty of Arts and Sciences and Acting President of Harvard University. He was a pioneering scholar of Japanese economic development, renowned for his wit, wisdom and warmth.

Rosovsky was one of the many brilliant minds who came to America to escape the Nazis. He was born in the Free City of Danzig in 1927, which was annexed by Germany in 1939. The Rosovsky family fled west, first to Belgium and then through France, Spain and Portugal to Hoboken and New York. In 1945, Rosovsky returned to Europe, as a member of the U.S. Army’s Counterintelligence Corps. He attended the Nuremberg Trials.

After completing his undergraduate degree at the College of William and Mary, with help from the G.I. Bill, Rosovsky returned to the Army and served in the Korean War. His feet froze during the retreat from the Yalu, and he received a Purple Heart. More importantly for Rosovsky’s future academic career, he spent a year in Japan, monitoring Russian broadcasting. That exposure seems to have bolstered his long-term interest in Japan’s rapid modernization after the Meiji Restoration, which would be echoed in the country’s remarkable rebirth after World War II.

In 1952, Rosovsky joined Harvard’s Society of Fellows. He studied economic history with Alexander Gerschenkron, another distinguished refugee from Nazi Europe. Rosovsky received his Ph.D. from our Department in 1959, having already joined the faculty of the University of California at Berkeley the previous year. At Berkeley, Rosovsky continued his work on Japan’s economic history and began his administrative career as chair of the Center for Japanese and Korean Studies. After seven years, he returned to Harvard.

Rosovsky’s Ph.D. dissertation became a core part of his magisterial 1961 work: Capital Formation in Japan. Like Simon Kuznets, another Harvard economic historian, Rosovsky had a particular aptitude for shining light on the economic past by assembling new data. The book reveals much about Japan’s growth from 1868 to 1940 simply by measuring the expansion of the capital stock. Rosovsky’s passion for uncovering Japanese data is illustrated even more starkly by his other 1961 book, Quantitative Japanese Economic History, which is described by its subtitle, An Annotated Bibliography and a Survey of U.S. Holdings.

Rosovsky's early career makes the point that new data – even of the most basic form— can fundamentally change the way that we view nations and their economies. Martin Bronfenbrenner’s Econometrica review of Capital Formation in Japan noted the two important and unexpected findings that were central to early reputation: public sector investment was central for Japanese development before World War II, and Japanese capital growth increased substantially after 1912. Public capital formation, which includes military investments, accounted for more than one-half of Japan’s capital accumulation during the pre-war years. About one-sixth of total investment was military in nature, which perhaps explains why the Japanese were able to best a much larger European power in the Russo-Japanese war. The important role that the public sector played in the Japanese economy dovetails with Gerschenkron’s emphasis on the outsized role that governments often play in the growth efforts of latecomers to industrialization, such as Tsarist Russia.

Rosovsky's finding that economic growth accelerated after 1912 suggests that the dramatic nature of the Meiji Restoration may have led scholars to exaggerate its impact on the economy. In his 1973 book on Japanese Economic Growth, Rosovsky emphasized that Japan’s transformation “can be conceived in terms of a series of growth phases or developmental ‘waves’ consisting of a spurt and followed by less growth.” By that point in time, the early 20th century spurt was completely overshadowed by Japan’s takeoff after World War II. With fifty years of hindsight, he seems even wiser. Japan’s forty anni mirabiles between 1950 and 1990 have been followed by decades in the economic doldrums.

Japanese Economic Growth was co-authored with Kazushi Ohkawa, who was a frequent collaborator. In 1963, they had put “Recent Growth in Historic Perspective” in the pages of the American Economic Review. In 1961, they wrote on “The Indigenous Components in the Modern Economy.” In 1960, they analyzed “The Role of Agriculture in Modern Economic Development.”

This last paper informed Rosovsky’s playfully-titled, but quite serious, 1968 essay “Rumbles in the Ricefields: Professor Nakamura vs. the Official Statistics.” Professor Nakamura’s thesis was that after Japan’s 1873 land tax, “Japanese farmers tried to minimize and to evade land tax payments, and this was most effectively accomplished by underreporting agricultural output.” Underreporting farm yields during the early period then led to “a great overstatement of the rate of growth of agricultural output” during later periods, when output assessments because more accurate. This essay shows that both erudition and wisdom can be needed to adjudicate the issues that can arise with old (and new) data.

That same combination of sagacity and far-ranging knowledge helped to make Rosovsky a superb academic administrator. In 1968, he chaired the Faculty Committee on African and Afro-American Studies, which then issued its so-called “Rosovsky Report,” calling for “the creation of a standing Faculty Committee on degrees in Afro-American Studies to develop and supervise a combined major in this field and to grant degrees starting with the class of 1972.” In 1969, Rosovsky started his term as Chair of the Economics Department. Four years later, he became Dean of the Faculty of Arts and Sciences.

Rosovsky was one of a trio of economists, along with John Dunlop and Michael Spence, who would lead the Harvard faculty between 1969 and 1990. Dunlop and both governed during contentious periods, where political divides split the Harvard community, but they had different styles. As The Harvard Crimson wrote in 1973 “ is attempting to unite the Faculty not with a diplomatic strong-arm (a la Dunlop) but with a strong-arm of diplomacy,” which meant that “Faculty members and many administrators feel more at ease in their chairs now that the strong armed Dunlop is Nixon's man and Rosovsky--who likes to share power--is their man.”

Rosovsky's tenure as dean illustrates that intelligent delegation can sometimes achieve far more than centralized control. Rosovsky drove the creation of Harvard’s “Core Curriculum,” which he hoped would “give all students a better sense of intellectual sympathy for one another” and set standards for what “an educated person” should know. commitment to curricular reform at Harvard led him to turn down the Presidencies of both Yale and the University of Chicago. Somehow he also managed to eliminate Harvard’s budget deficit.

After he resigned as Dean in 1984, he joined the then-seven-member Harvard Corporation which oversees the entire university. He served as Acting President of the University in 1984 and in 1987, when President Bok took a brief sabbatical. He returned briefly to the Deanship of the Faculty of Arts and Sciences in 1990. In 1991, he published The University: An Owner’s Manual, which became his most cited work. This book subjected American academia to the same form of thoughtful analysis that Rosovsky once applied to Japanese time series data. In this case, Rosovsky’s data was his 30 years of experience at the epicenter of American academic life. Harvard’s Rosovsky Hall, completed in 1994, houses the Harvard-Radcliffe Hillel, and celebrates both Rosovsky’s contributions to the University and his particular support for Jewish life at Harvard.

Henry Rosovsky’s contributions to Harvard and to education in America go far beyond our department, but he was an important member of our community for almost seven decades. He was part of the vibrant tradition of economic history at Harvard, who linked back to Gershenkron and Kuznets, across to David Landes, and forward to Jeffrey Williamson and Claudia Goldin. His pioneering role connecting our department with East Asia was continued by Dwight Perkins and has only become more important over time. His remarkable ability to forge consensus from discord and his commitment to core academic values remain inspirational.