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Ladies and gentlemen, good afternoon and welcome. I’m Nicholas Eberstadt, the Henry Wendt Chair in Political Economy here at the American Enterprise Institute, and I am delighted to introduce our man of the hour, Professor Jeffrey G. Williamson, for the third in our series of Wendt Distinguished Lectures.

AEI’s Wendt Program in Global Political Economy was established through the generosity of the SmithKline Beecham pharmaceuticals company and Mr. Henry Wendt, CEO emeritus of SmithKline Beecham, now Glaxo SmithKline.

Mr. Wendt’s interests, incidentally, are many and varied--he is among other things the co-proprietor, with his wife Holly, of the Quivira Vineyards in Northern California: and at the reception immediately following this lecture I’m hoping you’ll join us to sample the fruits of some of his other labors.

The Wendt Program at AEI is devoted to the study of globalization and its consequences. The program’s research, publications, and conferences are addressed to the growth of transnational markets, commerce, communications, and business organization--and to the consequences of that growth for government policy and social welfare in both the developed and developing nations.

The Wendt Program is particularly concerned with the global extension of liberal political institutions--democracy, civil and commercial freedom, open markets, and the rule of law--and with the maintenance of security arrangements necessary for those institutions to flourish.

One special--I should say especially delightful--component of this program is the Wendt Distinguished Lecture. The lectureship is awarded as an honor--conferred on a scholar or thinker who has made major contributions to our understanding of the modern phenomenon of globalization--but it is also an intellectual event in itself, an occasion at which the awardee is invited to extend his or her ambit for our benefit in public.

Our first Wendt Distinguished Lecturer was Angus Maddison, the eminent economic historian and self-described "chiffrephile", who treated us to an exposition and evaluation of the past thousand years of global economic development--covering the terrain at a pace of roughly eleven years per minute, as perhaps only he could do.

Our second awardee was Deepak Lal--accomplished economist, historian, and sometime philosopher--who offered a provocative and spirited defense of the proposition that international empires can be a vehicle for promoting global economic well-being.

(I’m not sure Radek Sikorski, the director of AEI’s New Atlantic Initiative and former Deputy Foreign Minister of a newly-free Poland, was entirely convinced by the presentation, but Radek: you have to admit that Deepak Lal and Leonid Brezhnev had somewhat different conceptions of "empire"!)

As you will appreciate, our first two Wendt Distinguished Lecturers set a somewhat daunting standard for the series. That is why I am so pleased that we can uphold and continue the tradition with today’s lecture by Jeffrey G. Williamson, who is presently Laird Bell Professor of Economics at Harvard University.

Now, I have to say something about Jeff--don’t let his youth and good looks deceive you. Since earning his dissertation from Stanford University in 1961, he has spent over four decades at the forefront of his profession: as a pioneer who has made prodigious contributions.

For those, like Professor Williamson, who are somewhat quantitatively inclined, one way of describing those contributions might be through numbers. According to the records of the Harvard Library system, some 35 books authored or coauthored by Professor J. G. Williamson are catalogued in their collection. The National Bureau of Economic Research, for its part, includes over of his 40 working papers since 1991 alone--and Econlit, the profession’s electronic reference service, lists just under 200 Williamson citations--and Econlit only goes back as far as 1969. (Jeff’s own c.v. by contrast modestly itemizes a mere 22 books and monographs, and barely 160 or so book chapters and articles in peer-reviewed journals!)

But of course it is not sheer output that has established Jeff’s reputation--it is the quality, and remarkable versatility, of his work.

Professor Williamson, to begin, is an accomplished cliometrician--more precisely, he is a towering presence within that discipline today. By applying quantitative techniques to the examination of local and international conditions in diverse past settings, he has cast new light on a whole array of questions and processes integral to the great, age-old human endeavors of advancing material progress and extending the range of choice.

A smattering of titles from some Professor Williamson’s books and papers may indicate the scope of his inquires:

• Lessons From Japanese Development: An Analytical Economic History (1974)
• Late Nineteenth Century American Development: A General Equilibrium History (1974)
• Coping With City Growth During The British Industrial Revolution (1990)
• Education, Globalization and Catch-up: Scandinavia in the Swedish Mirror (1996)
• Were Trade and Factor Mobility Substitutes in History? (1999)

But in addition to his day job as an economic historian, Jeff also moonlights: for as it happens, he is one of the leading authorities in contemporary development economics. Just as with the past, he has methodically illuminated the present through his concert of econometric acumen, mastery of detail, and attention to theory. Here again, a sample of his work must suffice to suggest the greater corpus:

• Education as an Asset in the Philippine Economy (1968)
• Why Do Koreans Save ‘So Little’? (1979)
• Modeling Growing Economies in Equilibrium and Disequilibrium (1983)
• Indian Urbanization And Growth Since 1960 (1992)
• Demographic Transitions and Economic Miracles in Emerging Asia (1998)
• Demographic and Economic Pressure on Emigration out of Africa (2003)

When we consider this lifetime of study--this sustained contemplation of what could be described as the varied instantiations of problems and progress in the great modern liberal project of worldwide economic integration--we can see why Jeffrey G. Williamson may perhaps be uniquely qualified to offer a perspective on what we now call "globalization".

Although time does not permit me to run through them all, Jeff has accumulated a whole slew of accolades over the course of his career. He is a former President of the Economic History Association, and he has served on the editorial boards (by one count) of at least a dozen prominent journals in his several fields of expertise. I myself, however, am most intrigued by his 1995 "Energizer Bunny Award"--"given to me", he writes, "by all my past dissertators from Wisconsin and Harvard".

The title of Professor Williamson’s lecture today is "The Political Economy of Migration: Comparing Two Global Centuries". Given ongoing developments in Europe and Japan, and no less importantly, in the United States, I think you’ll agree with me that the topic could hardly be more profound--or timely.

"Energizer", take it away!

Nicholas Eberstadt is the Henry Wendt Scholar at AEI.