Wednesday, August 19, 2020

Kamala Harris Also Has An Economist Uncle

 Who I happen to know and who got his PhD in economics and computer science from the University of Wisconsin-Madison.  He is now being identified in the media as Gopalan Balachandron, which puts his last name first.  I knew him as a grad student when Kamala's dad, Don Harris, was on the UW faculty, and he was "Bala Gopalan" to all of us, a very witty and cosmopolitan guy.  When I saw him on the news, now 80 years old and living in Delhi and praising the selection of Kamala as Dem VP candidate, I was not sure it was him, but quick checking established it is.  I finally also remembered somebody bringing it up that he was Don's brother-in-law, only two years older than him, but he did not want to talk about it, this being when the marriage of Don and Bala's sister was going down the tubes.  

The news reports have it that when he was working most recently he was working for an Indian government-related think tank called the Institute for Defence Studies and Analysis in its American Affairs section.  I also saw one report referring to him as "Prof." which makes me think he was an academic for awhile, but I lost track of him after he left Madison, except for hearing from a common old friend of ours in Chennai that Bala "works for the government in Delhi."  But I guess not anymore.  It strikes me that if Biden-Harris win, Bala might become an important diplomatic player.

It also strikes me that if Kamals's dad, Don Harris, continues to lay low and essentially not support her, I could imagine Uncle Bala getting brought in to provide some male family support.  I bet he could handle the media well. He is quite a character and very sharp as well as articulate.

Barkley Rosser

6 comments:

Anonymous said...

Barkley Rosser:

It also strikes me that if Kamala's dad, Don Harris, continues to lay low and essentially not support her, I could imagine Uncle Bala getting brought in to provide some male family support....

[ Forgive me (or not), but this is a creepy sentence. ]

rosserjb@jmu.edu said...

Well, probably her husband will be more than sufficient, if it is even needed or useful at all.

Anonymous said...

Thank you.

rosserjb@jmu.edu said...

I appreciate that my remark raises possible sexism issues. But we must face that a woman candidate for high office will face skepticism by male sexist voters, so I think it helps to have some male support visible besides Biden, especially given that unfortunately her dad is missing in action due to their complicated personal relationship. So I suggested Uncle Bala, who is a great guy, but I also understand that it might not be all that wise to bring him in given that he is living in India, which might raise hackles among all the xwnophobes out there, with many of them overlapping with the sexists. Easy to say she (and Biden) should not want any of their votes, but we know that there are spectra on both sexism and xenophobia, and I fear that Biden-Harris will need to pull in at least some of the more moderate of those folks to really pound the nails into the coffin of the worst president in American history.

Fred C. Dobbs said...

Kamala Harris’s Father, a Footnote in Her Speeches, Is a Prominent Economist

NY Times - August 21

In a warm, encyclopedic tribute to her family Wednesday night, as she formally accepted the vice-presidential nomination, Senator Kamala Harris skimmed past any discussion of her father, Donald J. Harris, a Jamaican-born professor of economics at Stanford University.

The reason is common to many of Ms. Harris’s generation: She is a child of divorce, raised by a single mother who became her most profound influence.

As Ms. Harris has stepped into the national spotlight, Dr. Harris, now 81 and long retired from teaching, has remained mostly silent. His only recent comments about her, published on a Jamaican website run by an acquaintance, express a combination of pride in his daughter and bitterness over their estrangement. ...

Dr. Harris did not respond to requests for comment for this article.

Despite his low profile in the election cycle, Dr. Harris is not an obscure figure. He was the first Black scholar to receive tenure in Stanford’s economics department, and a prominent critic of mainstream economic theory from the left.

The Stanford Daily, reporting in 1976, described him as a “Marxist scholar,” and said there was some opposition to granting him tenure because he was “too charismatic, a pied piper leading students astray from neo-Classical economics.” ...

Dr. Harris, in his 2018 essay, said his early, close contact with his daughters “came to an abrupt halt” after a contentious custody battle. He said the divorce settlement had been “based on the false assumption by the State of California that fathers cannot handle parenting (especially in the case of this father, ‘a neegroe from da eyelans,’ was the Yankee stereotype, who might just end up eating his children for breakfast!) Nevertheless I persisted, never giving up on my love for my children.”

This friction did not slow Dr. Harris’s professional rise, and he was granted tenure first at the University of Wisconsin and then at Stanford University. Dr. Harris’s 1978 book, “Capital Accumulation and Income Distribution,” is dedicated “to Kamala and Maya.” ...

rosserjb@jmu.edu said...

Something appearing later in that article, Fred, is a quote from my friend, Bob Blecker, an econ prof at American U. and a student of Don Harris's from Stanford. He stated that watching Kamala Harris grill Trump appointees on the Senate Judiciary Committee reminded him of watching Don take people apart in economics seminars at Stanford. There is serious insight.