Douglas Fitzgerald Dowd (December 7, 1919 – September 8, 2017) was an American political economist, economic historian and political activist.

Academic career

From the late 1940s to the late 1990s, Dowd taught at

Cornell University Cornell University is a private statutory land-grant research university based in Ithaca, New York. It is a member of the Ivy League. Founded in 1865 by Ezra Cornell and Andrew Dickson White, Cornell was founded with the intention to tea ...

, the

University of California, Berkeley The University of California, Berkeley (UC Berkeley, Berkeley, Cal, or California) is a public land-grant research university in Berkeley, California. Established in 1868 as the University of California, it is the state's first land-grant u ...

and other universities. He has authored books that criticize capitalism in general, and US capitalism in particular. He was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship in the field of economic history for the academic year 1959–1960. Many of his writings and audio transcripts are available on his website.

Personal life

Dowd was the son of a Jewish mother and a Catholic father. The strong dislike for each side of the family for the other side led him during his youth to embrace an antireligious attitude. Dowd claimed to be "non-religious" without saying if he was an agnostic or atheist.

Politics

Dowd was one of the nominees of the Peace and Freedom Party for

Vice President A vice president, also director in British English, is an officer in government or business who is below the president (chief executive officer) in rank. It can also refer to executive vice presidents, signifying that the vice president is on ...

in the 1968 US presidential election. He agreed to be on the ticket in New York in order to prevent the selection of

Jerry Rubin Jerry Clyde Rubin (July 14, 1938 – November 28, 1994) was an American social activist, anti-war leader, and counterculture icon during the 1960s and 1970s. During the 1980s, he became a successful businessman. He is known for being one of the ...

. The party's presidential candidate that year was Black Panther

Eldridge Cleaver Leroy Eldridge Cleaver (August 31, 1935 – May 1, 1998) was an American writer and political activist who became an early leader of the Black Panther Party. In 1968, Cleaver wrote '' Soul on Ice'', a collection of essays that, at the time of i ...

, who finished a distant fifth in the election. Dowd was a sponsor of the War Tax Resistance project, which practiced and advocated

tax resistance Tax resistance is the refusal to pay tax because of opposition to the government that is imposing the tax, or to government policy, or as opposition to taxation in itself. Tax resistance is a form of direct action and, if in violation of the tax ...

as a form of protest against the Vietnam War. Dowd was the faculty sponsor of the West Tennessee Voters Project in Fayette County, Tennessee, that inspired a sizable number of Cornell students to become more active in civil rights work in the South one year after the gruesome murder of Andrew Goodman, Michael Schwerner and James Chaney in Philadelphia, Mississippi.

Bibliography

* ''Step by step'' (1965) * ''Modern Economic Problems in Historical Perspective'' (1965) * ''Thorstein Veblen: A Critical Reappraisal; Lectures and Essays Commemorating the Hundredth Anniversary of Veblen's Birth'' (1965) * ''America's role in the world economy:the challenge to orthodoxy'' (1966) * ''The Twisted Dream: Capitalist Development in the United States Since 1776'' (1974) 2nd edition (1977) * ''Waste of Nations: Dysfunction in the World Economy'' (1989) * ''U.S. Capitalist Development Since 1776: Of, By, and for Which People?'' (1993) * ''Blues for America: A Critique, a Lament, and Some Memories'' (1997) * ''Against the Conventional Wisdom: A Primer for Current Economics Controversies and Proposals'' (1997) * ''Capitalism and Its Economics: A Critical History'' (2000) * ''Understanding Capitalism: Critical Analysis from Karl Marx to Amartya Sen'' (2002) * ''At the Cliffs Edge: World Problems and U.S. Power'' (Peninsula Peace and Justice Center, 2007) * ''Inequality and the Global Economic Crisis'' (2009)

Footnotes

External links

Official site of Doug Dowd
{{DEFAULTSORT:Dowd, Douglas Fitzgerald 1919 births 2017 deaths American economists American economics writers American male non-fiction writers American military personnel of World War II American tax resisters Economic historians Jewish American social scientists Peace and Freedom Party vice presidential nominees 1968 United States vice-presidential candidates University of California, Berkeley faculty Cornell University faculty 21st-century American Jews