STEPHEN A MARGLIN holds the Walter S Barker Chair in the Department of Economics at Harvard University. He became a tenured professor at Harvard in 1968, one of the youngest in the history of the University. Marglin has contributed to many aspects of economics over his long career: his published papers and books range over the foundations of cost-benefit analysis, the workings of the labor-surplus economy, the organization of production, the relationship between the growth of income and its distribution, the foundational assumptions of economics, and, most recently, the reformulation of John Maynard Keynes's macroeconomic vision into an updated General Theory for the 21st century. His work has been translated into many languages, including French, German, Japanese, Korean, Spanish, and Ukrainian.
The Dismal Science: How Thinking Like an Economist Undermines Community (Harvard University Press, 2008) summarizes Marglin’s work on the foundational assumptions of economics and how these assumptions make community invisible to economists. This work counters the aid and comfort these foundational assumptions give to those who would construct a world in the image of economics, a world ultimately without community.
Raising Keynes: A Twenty-First Century General Theory (Harvard University Press, 2021) fills in the theoretical gaps in Keynes's seminal General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money and answers the criticisms that have been leveled against Keynes since its publication in 1936.
Over the first decade of this century Marglin taught an introductory economics course that presented both standard economics and a variety of critiques of economics. In the second decade Marglin's economics teaching has reflected the research that produced Raising Keynes. During both decades he has also taught a social studies course that examines the assumptions of modernity and how these assumptions have shaped both the culture of the Modern West and the experience of colonization, development, and globalization. This course has been a natural complement to his work on the foundations of economics since in many ways the assumptions behind mainstream economics are a stripped-down version of the cultural presuppositions of modernity.
Marglin is married to Christine Marglin (née Benvenuto). She is the author of Shiksa: The Gentile Woman in the Jewish World and Sex Changes: A Memoir of Marriage, Gender, and Moving On. Marglin's previous two marriages, to Carol Kurson (died 2020) and Frederique Apffel-Marglin, ended in divorce. From youngest to oldest, his children (including stepchildren) are Nasia Benvenuto-Ladin, 2021 high-school grad; Yael Benvenuto-Ladin, graduating from college in 2022; Gabriel Benvenuto-Ladin, working in theater production; Jessica Marglin, associate professor of Jewish Studies and religion, law, and history; Elizabeth Marglin, freelance writer; David Marglin, attorney; and Marc Weisskopf, professor of environmental epidemiology and physiology. Marglin has seven grandchildren. In his spare time he takes care of two horses, two cats, a dog, a large vegetable garden, and a small apple orchard.