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| Charles R. Morris | |
Charles R. Morris, "a former government official, banker and self-taught historian of economics who as a prolific, iconoclastic author challenged conventional political and economic pieties," died December 13, the New York Times reported. He was 82. His 15 nonfiction books "often revisited well-trodden topics," but he "injected them with revealing details, provocative insights and fluid narratives."
Morris wrote his first book, The Cost of Good Intentions: New York City and the Liberal Experiment (1980), after serving as director of welfare programs under New York City Mayor John V. Lindsay and as secretary of social and health services in Washington State. The book "was less a screed about liberal profligacy as it was an expression of disappointment that benevolent officials had become wedded to programs that didn't work," the Times noted.
His other works include A Time of Passion: America 1960-1980 (1984); A Rabble of Dead Money: The Great Crash and the Global Depression: 1929-1939 (2017); Comeback: America's New Economic Boom (2013); The Sages: Warren Buffett, George Soros, Paul Volcker, and the Maelstrom of Markets (2009); The Surgeons: Life and Death in a Top Heart Center (2007); American Catholic: The Saints and Sinners Who Built America's Most Powerful Church (1997); and The Tycoons: How Andrew Carnegie, John D. Rockefeller, Jay Gould, and J.P. Morgan Invented the American Supereconomy (2005).
In The Trillion Dollar Meltdown: Easy Money, High Rollers and the Great Credit Crash (2008), which won the Gerald Loeb Award for business reporting, Morris "precisely predicted the collapse of the investment bank Bear Stearns and the ensuing global recession," the Times noted, adding: "He wrote the book in 2007, when most experts were still expressing optimism about the economy. He also appeared in the Oscar-winning documentary Inside Job (2010) about the 2008 financial crisis."
"I think we're heading for the mother of all crashes. It will happen in summer of 2008, I think," Morris wrote his publisher, Peter Osnos, founder of PublicAffairs Books, early in 2007.
Osnos recalled that after the book was published, "George Soros and Paul Volcker called me and asked, 'Who is this Morris, and how did he get this so right, so early?' "