Eliot Janeway
Encyclopedia
Eliot Janeway born Eliot Jacobstein, was an influential American
economist
, journalist
and author
whose career spanned seven decades. He was an economic advisor to Presidents Franklin D. Roosevelt
and Lyndon B. Johnson
. His eclectic approach focused on the interaction between political
pressures, economic
policy and market trend
s. He was a vigorous critic of the economic policies of presidents from Franklin D. Roosevelt to Ronald Reagan
, and his ideas anticipated contemporary economic and financial proposals.
on January 1, 1913, the son of Jewish parents Meyer Joseph Jacobstein and the former Fanny Siff. Later Elliot kept private his heritage and religion, with the assistance of those around him—he never acknowledged to others his Jewish religion, culture or heritage. His mother had two nameplates for the buzzer panel in the lobby of her apartment house, Jacobstein and Janeway, and changed them depending on whom she was expecting.
He majored in economics at Cornell University
, graduating at the age of 19, and did graduate work at the London School of Economics
in the early 1930s, where he was briefly a member of the British Communist Party. While he did not consistently champion any particular branch of economic theory, his classic economic history and first book, Struggle for Survival, chronicled the Roosevelt administration's World War II
mobilization and hyperactive Keynesian fiscal policy.
In 1938 Janeway married the former Elizabeth Hall. His wife, as Elizabeth Janeway
, became a noteworthy novel
ist and essay
ist. They had two sons, Michael C. Janeway
, a former editor of the Boston Globe and dean of Northwestern University's
Medill School of Journalism, and William H. Janeway, a vice chairman until 2006 at Warburg Pincus
, a private equity firm. Michael also served as a special assistant to U.S. Secretary of State
Cyrus Vance
and is currently a professor at Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism
.
magazine predicting the 1937-38 recession
and proposing a massive program of government investment in transportation and power equipment to cure it. Known as the Roosevelt Recession, with the exception of the Great Depression
, it was perhaps the sharpest and deepest economic downturn of the century. The combination of higher reserve
requirements imposed by the Federal Reserve Board on the nation's commercial bank
s and the introduction of the new Social Security
tax
on employees and employers contributed to the downturn.
Janeway's articles also warned against selling arms to Japan
long before the attack on Pearl Harbor
and noted that U.S. railroads
needed renovation. His articles attracted interest in the Roosevelt administration and brought him some influence within its policy-making councils. Another interested reader was Henry R. Luce, who hired Janeway to write part-time for Time
and Fortune
magazines. Janeway worked for the magazines until 1944, and then for the next four years directly for Luce, writing a private weekly economic and political advisory letter. In 1948, he quit to write his first book, Struggle for Survival, which was published in 1951.
According to Janeway, Roosevelt followed the war president path of Abraham Lincoln
. Janeway believed that both were too practical to try to micro-manage a wartime mobilization, and that both realized that the mobilization could be confused at the top as long as it was overwhelming at the base. As Janeway said, "A victory small enough to be organized is too small to be decisive." Throughout the war, Roosevelt "looked to democracy and not to leaders, to democracy’s reservoir of mass energy and faith and not to the custodians of specialized wisdom."
As Janeway would later say in a 1988 interview: "The Depression transformed economics from a subject of study into an obstacle to be overcome." His Struggle for Survival discussed how World War II and its full employment boom had transformed economics from a dismal science into the means for dynamic possibilities. "I'm the last person who could be accused of practicing economics in any sort of computerized vacuum," he once told an interviewer. "Political economy is not a science, it's a clinical art, like medicine."
In 1955 Janeway started two weekly economic advisory newsletters that formed the heart of the Janeway Publishing and Research Corporation, a business he operated out of his five-story town house on East 80th Street in New York City. In addition to his newsletters, in the 1960s and 1970s Janeway was a syndicated columnist for the Chicago Tribune
-New York News syndicate. Janeway scored a number of forecasting firsts, among them higher interest rates that followed the escalation of the Vietnam War
. He also became famous in the late 1960s for his dire forecasts of stock market trauma, which earned him the nickname "Calamity Janeway" on Wall Street
.
Janeway was an informal adviser to Lyndon B. Johnson during Johnson's career in the United States House of Representatives
and Senate
. Janeway was among those who urged Johnson to run for the presidency in 1956 and was an active fundraiser for Johnson during the 1960 Democratic
presidential primaries. After Johnson became president in November 1963, Janeway disagreed with him on many points of fiscal policy, and broke irrevocably with the president when Johnson escalated the war in Vietnam in 1965. Janeway's book, The Economics of Crisis, resulted from his break with Johnson.
Janeway's analysis and criticism of Johnson's handling of the Vietnam War was economic in nature and affected by Struggle for Survival, his early work on the history of the World War II mobilization. "I was not arguing against the war itself; that is not my field of expertise," he said in an interview. "I said that putting it on the back of the economy without raising taxes and instituting controls would bring on disaster."
in farming regions of the U.S. might lead to an agricultural depression. To some extent he anticipated the credit crunch of the mid-1980s, which resulted in the savings and loan industry's troubles throughout farm country. Janeway also anticipated the widespread advent of two-income families when, in 1976, he said that "single-paycheck families are doomed. They don't have a fighting chance. They're like a patient without an oxygen tent, an appendicitis victim without penicillin."
During the 1970s, in personal appearances and in his newspaper columns in more than a dozen newspapers, Janeway warned that "housing prices and interest rates will go through the roof" and that the stock market was heading for a collapse. In late 1974, the Dow Jones Industrial Average
, which had peaked above 1,000 a year earlier, fell to 577. Janeway appeared on TV talk shows and on lecture tours, reportedly receiving as much as five thousand dollars a speech. He wrote eight books and articles for many publications that included Newsweek
, Barron's
, Commonweal
and the New York Times.
In 1989 Janeway published his final book, The Economics of Chaos. This book once again reflected the influence of the 1940s mobilization model on Janeway's thinking, as he called for mobilizing the country's hidden assets. Janeway arrived at diverse reform strategies by a reconsideration of U.S. economic history from Alexander Hamilton
to Ronald Reagan. He proposed swapping U.S. food exports for oil imports, and demanded somewhat protectionst
"reciprocity" in trade, whereby importers who penetrated more than 25 percent of a U.S. domestic market would be required to invest in American assets or buy U.S. products.
In The Economics of Chaos Janeway urged the United States Treasury Department to invest Social Security and other government trust funds more aggressively to generate greater benefits. Such improved benefits, Janeway argued, would coax millions of workers in the underground economy
to pay their taxes in order to receive the better returns of government-sponsored programs. Janeway's proposal to invest Social Security funds more aggressively anticipated present-day calls to privatize Social Security trust funds and invest them more aggressively in the stock market
.
Janeway had other maverick proposals to halt the flight of workers and cash into the vast underground economy, which he called a three-ring circus consisting of growing numbers of people working off the books, the bustling Eurodollar
market and the illegal drug trade
. After The Economics of Chaos was published, Janeway's health declined and he suffered from diabetes and heart
problems. He died on February 8, 1993 at the Columbia-Presbyterian Medical Center in Manhattan at the age of 80.
concluded: "What Eliot Janeway excelled at was keeping himself in the limelight and latching onto people who were going places. He did both of these things better and longer than most...During the 1970s and 80s, when men like (Abe) Fortas
and (Felix) Cohen
had faded into the past, the high-flying Janeway was starring in television commercials for Mazda
and Glenfiddich Scotch
and slipping economic ideas to Jimmy Carter
and Bill Clinton
."
Another reviewer of Michael Janeway's book, Christopher Caldwell, saw Eliot Janeway in less flattering terms: "Michael Janeway writes that his father carried a boyish love of conspiracy into the New Deal
, working through 'backdoor channels, off-the-books agendas, manipulation of the system, sponsorship by powerful patrons,' even when he didn't have to...[Michael] Janeway is, again and again, honest about things that it is hard to be honest about, above all his father's gradual abandonment of the life of the mind for the life of influence, and his progress down the well-traveled road from political insider to political hanger-on."
Janeway's consistent pessimism also sometimes misled him in economic forecasts. In 1984, for instance, with a strong economic recovery in place that would continue for a number of years, Janeway asserted that the U.S. economy was "jammed into stoppage" and expressed his usual bearish opinions on its future course.
In honor of Janeway's contributions as an economic historian, Princeton University
endowed the Eliot Janeway lectures on historical economics. These have included James Tobin
's 1972 lectures, "The New Economics a Decade Older," published in 1974, and Albert O. Hirschman
's "Shifting Involvement: Private Interest and Public Action," first published in 1982.
United States
The United States of America is a federal constitutional republic comprising fifty states and a federal district...
economist
Economist
An economist is a professional in the social science discipline of economics. The individual may also study, develop, and apply theories and concepts from economics and write about economic policy...
, journalist
Journalist
A journalist collects and distributes news and other information. A journalist's work is referred to as journalism.A reporter is a type of journalist who researchs, writes, and reports on information to be presented in mass media, including print media , electronic media , and digital media A...
and author
Author
An author is broadly defined as "the person who originates or gives existence to anything" and that authorship determines responsibility for what is created. Narrowly defined, an author is the originator of any written work.-Legal significance:...
whose career spanned seven decades. He was an economic advisor to Presidents Franklin D. Roosevelt
Franklin D. Roosevelt
Franklin Delano Roosevelt , also known by his initials, FDR, was the 32nd President of the United States and a central figure in world events during the mid-20th century, leading the United States during a time of worldwide economic crisis and world war...
and Lyndon B. Johnson
Lyndon B. Johnson
Lyndon Baines Johnson , often referred to as LBJ, was the 36th President of the United States after his service as the 37th Vice President of the United States...
. His eclectic approach focused on the interaction between political
Politics
Politics is a process by which groups of people make collective decisions. The term is generally applied to the art or science of running governmental or state affairs, including behavior within civil governments, but also applies to institutions, fields, and special interest groups such as the...
pressures, economic
Economics
Economics is the social science that analyzes the production, distribution, and consumption of goods and services. The term economics comes from the Ancient Greek from + , hence "rules of the house"...
policy and market trend
Market trend
A market trend is a putative tendency of a financial market to move in a particular direction over time. These trends are classified as secular for long time frames, primary for medium time frames, and secondary for short time frames...
s. He was a vigorous critic of the economic policies of presidents from Franklin D. Roosevelt to Ronald Reagan
Ronald Reagan
Ronald Wilson Reagan was the 40th President of the United States , the 33rd Governor of California and, prior to that, a radio, film and television actor....
, and his ideas anticipated contemporary economic and financial proposals.
Early life, education and marriage
Janeway was born Eliot Jacobstein in New York CityNew York City
New York is the most populous city in the United States and the center of the New York Metropolitan Area, one of the most populous metropolitan areas in the world. New York exerts a significant impact upon global commerce, finance, media, art, fashion, research, technology, education, and...
on January 1, 1913, the son of Jewish parents Meyer Joseph Jacobstein and the former Fanny Siff. Later Elliot kept private his heritage and religion, with the assistance of those around him—he never acknowledged to others his Jewish religion, culture or heritage. His mother had two nameplates for the buzzer panel in the lobby of her apartment house, Jacobstein and Janeway, and changed them depending on whom she was expecting.
He majored in economics at Cornell University
Cornell University
Cornell University is an Ivy League university located in Ithaca, New York, United States. It is a private land-grant university, receiving annual funding from the State of New York for certain educational missions...
, graduating at the age of 19, and did graduate work at the London School of Economics
London School of Economics
The London School of Economics and Political Science is a public research university specialised in the social sciences located in London, United Kingdom, and a constituent college of the federal University of London...
in the early 1930s, where he was briefly a member of the British Communist Party. While he did not consistently champion any particular branch of economic theory, his classic economic history and first book, Struggle for Survival, chronicled the Roosevelt administration's World War II
World War II
World War II, or the Second World War , was a global conflict lasting from 1939 to 1945, involving most of the world's nations—including all of the great powers—eventually forming two opposing military alliances: the Allies and the Axis...
mobilization and hyperactive Keynesian fiscal policy.
In 1938 Janeway married the former Elizabeth Hall. His wife, as Elizabeth Janeway
Elizabeth Janeway
Elizabeth Janeway was an American author and critic.Born Elizabeth Ames Hall in Brooklyn, New York, her naval architect father and homemaker mother fell on hard times during the Depression, leading her to end her Swarthmore College education and help support the family by creating bargain basement...
, became a noteworthy novel
Novel
A novel is a book of long narrative in literary prose. The genre has historical roots both in the fields of the medieval and early modern romance and in the tradition of the novella. The latter supplied the present generic term in the late 18th century....
ist and essay
Essay
An essay is a piece of writing which is often written from an author's personal point of view. Essays can consist of a number of elements, including: literary criticism, political manifestos, learned arguments, observations of daily life, recollections, and reflections of the author. The definition...
ist. They had two sons, Michael C. Janeway
Michael C. Janeway
Michael C. Janeway is currently a professor at the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism. He previously was editor of the Boston Globe and dean of the Medill School of Journalism at Northwestern University....
, a former editor of the Boston Globe and dean of Northwestern University's
Northwestern University
Northwestern University is a private research university in Evanston and Chicago, Illinois, USA. Northwestern has eleven undergraduate, graduate, and professional schools offering 124 undergraduate degrees and 145 graduate and professional degrees....
Medill School of Journalism, and William H. Janeway, a vice chairman until 2006 at Warburg Pincus
Warburg Pincus
Warburg Pincus, LLC is an American private equity firm with offices in the United States, Europe, Brazil and Asia. It has been a private equity investor since 1966...
, a private equity firm. Michael also served as a special assistant to U.S. Secretary of State
Secretary of State
Secretary of State or State Secretary is a commonly used title for a senior or mid-level post in governments around the world. The role varies between countries, and in some cases there are multiple Secretaries of State in the Government....
Cyrus Vance
Cyrus Vance
Cyrus Roberts Vance was an American lawyer and United States Secretary of State under President Jimmy Carter from 1977 to 1980...
and is currently a professor at Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism
Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism
The Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism is one of Columbia's graduate and professional schools. It offers three degree programs: Master of Science in journalism , Master of Arts in journalism and a Ph.D. in communications...
.
Early career
Janeway's writing career began at 24, when he wrote a series of articles for The NationThe Nation
The Nation is the oldest continuously published weekly magazine in the United States. The periodical, devoted to politics and culture, is self-described as "the flagship of the left." Founded on July 6, 1865, It is published by The Nation Company, L.P., at 33 Irving Place, New York City.The Nation...
magazine predicting the 1937-38 recession
Recession
In economics, a recession is a business cycle contraction, a general slowdown in economic activity. During recessions, many macroeconomic indicators vary in a similar way...
and proposing a massive program of government investment in transportation and power equipment to cure it. Known as the Roosevelt Recession, with the exception of the Great Depression
Great Depression
The Great Depression was a severe worldwide economic depression in the decade preceding World War II. The timing of the Great Depression varied across nations, but in most countries it started in about 1929 and lasted until the late 1930s or early 1940s...
, it was perhaps the sharpest and deepest economic downturn of the century. The combination of higher reserve
Fractional-reserve banking
Fractional-reserve banking is a form of banking where banks maintain reserves that are only a fraction of the customer's deposits. Funds deposited into a bank are mostly lent out, and a bank keeps only a fraction of the quantity of deposits as reserves...
requirements imposed by the Federal Reserve Board on the nation's commercial bank
Bank
A bank is a financial institution that serves as a financial intermediary. The term "bank" may refer to one of several related types of entities:...
s and the introduction of the new Social Security
Social Security (United States)
In the United States, Social Security refers to the federal Old-Age, Survivors, and Disability Insurance program.The original Social Security Act and the current version of the Act, as amended encompass several social welfare and social insurance programs...
tax
Tax
To tax is to impose a financial charge or other levy upon a taxpayer by a state or the functional equivalent of a state such that failure to pay is punishable by law. Taxes are also imposed by many subnational entities...
on employees and employers contributed to the downturn.
Janeway's articles also warned against selling arms to Japan
Japan
Japan is an island nation in East Asia. Located in the Pacific Ocean, it lies to the east of the Sea of Japan, China, North Korea, South Korea and Russia, stretching from the Sea of Okhotsk in the north to the East China Sea and Taiwan in the south...
long before the attack on Pearl Harbor
Attack on Pearl Harbor
The attack on Pearl Harbor was a surprise military strike conducted by the Imperial Japanese Navy against the United States naval base at Pearl Harbor, Hawaii, on the morning of December 7, 1941...
and noted that U.S. railroads
Rail transport
Rail transport is a means of conveyance of passengers and goods by way of wheeled vehicles running on rail tracks. In contrast to road transport, where vehicles merely run on a prepared surface, rail vehicles are also directionally guided by the tracks they run on...
needed renovation. His articles attracted interest in the Roosevelt administration and brought him some influence within its policy-making councils. Another interested reader was Henry R. Luce, who hired Janeway to write part-time for Time
Time (magazine)
Time is an American news magazine. A European edition is published from London. Time Europe covers the Middle East, Africa and, since 2003, Latin America. An Asian edition is based in Hong Kong...
and Fortune
Fortune (magazine)
Fortune is a global business magazine published by Time Inc. Founded by Henry Luce in 1930, the publishing business, consisting of Time, Life, Fortune, and Sports Illustrated, grew to become Time Warner. In turn, AOL grew as it acquired Time Warner in 2000 when Time Warner was the world's largest...
magazines. Janeway worked for the magazines until 1944, and then for the next four years directly for Luce, writing a private weekly economic and political advisory letter. In 1948, he quit to write his first book, Struggle for Survival, which was published in 1951.
According to Janeway, Roosevelt followed the war president path of Abraham Lincoln
Abraham Lincoln
Abraham Lincoln was the 16th President of the United States, serving from March 1861 until his assassination in April 1865. He successfully led his country through a great constitutional, military and moral crisis – the American Civil War – preserving the Union, while ending slavery, and...
. Janeway believed that both were too practical to try to micro-manage a wartime mobilization, and that both realized that the mobilization could be confused at the top as long as it was overwhelming at the base. As Janeway said, "A victory small enough to be organized is too small to be decisive." Throughout the war, Roosevelt "looked to democracy and not to leaders, to democracy’s reservoir of mass energy and faith and not to the custodians of specialized wisdom."
As Janeway would later say in a 1988 interview: "The Depression transformed economics from a subject of study into an obstacle to be overcome." His Struggle for Survival discussed how World War II and its full employment boom had transformed economics from a dismal science into the means for dynamic possibilities. "I'm the last person who could be accused of practicing economics in any sort of computerized vacuum," he once told an interviewer. "Political economy is not a science, it's a clinical art, like medicine."
In 1955 Janeway started two weekly economic advisory newsletters that formed the heart of the Janeway Publishing and Research Corporation, a business he operated out of his five-story town house on East 80th Street in New York City. In addition to his newsletters, in the 1960s and 1970s Janeway was a syndicated columnist for the Chicago Tribune
Chicago Tribune
The Chicago Tribune is a major daily newspaper based in Chicago, Illinois, and the flagship publication of the Tribune Company. Formerly self-styled as the "World's Greatest Newspaper" , it remains the most read daily newspaper of the Chicago metropolitan area and the Great Lakes region and is...
-New York News syndicate. Janeway scored a number of forecasting firsts, among them higher interest rates that followed the escalation of the Vietnam War
Vietnam War
The Vietnam War was a Cold War-era military conflict that occurred in Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia from 1 November 1955 to the fall of Saigon on 30 April 1975. This war followed the First Indochina War and was fought between North Vietnam, supported by its communist allies, and the government of...
. He also became famous in the late 1960s for his dire forecasts of stock market trauma, which earned him the nickname "Calamity Janeway" on Wall Street
Wall Street
Wall Street refers to the financial district of New York City, named after and centered on the eight-block-long street running from Broadway to South Street on the East River in Lower Manhattan. Over time, the term has become a metonym for the financial markets of the United States as a whole, or...
.
Janeway was an informal adviser to Lyndon B. Johnson during Johnson's career in the United States House of Representatives
United States House of Representatives
The United States House of Representatives is one of the two Houses of the United States Congress, the bicameral legislature which also includes the Senate.The composition and powers of the House are established in Article One of the Constitution...
and Senate
United States Senate
The United States Senate is the upper house of the bicameral legislature of the United States, and together with the United States House of Representatives comprises the United States Congress. The composition and powers of the Senate are established in Article One of the U.S. Constitution. Each...
. Janeway was among those who urged Johnson to run for the presidency in 1956 and was an active fundraiser for Johnson during the 1960 Democratic
Democratic Party (United States)
The Democratic Party is one of two major contemporary political parties in the United States, along with the Republican Party. The party's socially liberal and progressive platform is largely considered center-left in the U.S. political spectrum. The party has the lengthiest record of continuous...
presidential primaries. After Johnson became president in November 1963, Janeway disagreed with him on many points of fiscal policy, and broke irrevocably with the president when Johnson escalated the war in Vietnam in 1965. Janeway's book, The Economics of Crisis, resulted from his break with Johnson.
Janeway's analysis and criticism of Johnson's handling of the Vietnam War was economic in nature and affected by Struggle for Survival, his early work on the history of the World War II mobilization. "I was not arguing against the war itself; that is not my field of expertise," he said in an interview. "I said that putting it on the back of the economy without raising taxes and instituting controls would bring on disaster."
Later career
In the mid-1970s, Janeway warned that a credit crunchCredit crunch
A credit crunch is a reduction in the general availability of loans or a sudden tightening of the conditions required to obtain a loan from the banks. A credit crunch generally involves a reduction in the availability of credit independent of a rise in official interest rates...
in farming regions of the U.S. might lead to an agricultural depression. To some extent he anticipated the credit crunch of the mid-1980s, which resulted in the savings and loan industry's troubles throughout farm country. Janeway also anticipated the widespread advent of two-income families when, in 1976, he said that "single-paycheck families are doomed. They don't have a fighting chance. They're like a patient without an oxygen tent, an appendicitis victim without penicillin."
During the 1970s, in personal appearances and in his newspaper columns in more than a dozen newspapers, Janeway warned that "housing prices and interest rates will go through the roof" and that the stock market was heading for a collapse. In late 1974, the Dow Jones Industrial Average
Dow Jones Industrial Average
The Dow Jones Industrial Average , also called the Industrial Average, the Dow Jones, the Dow 30, or simply the Dow, is a stock market index, and one of several indices created by Wall Street Journal editor and Dow Jones & Company co-founder Charles Dow...
, which had peaked above 1,000 a year earlier, fell to 577. Janeway appeared on TV talk shows and on lecture tours, reportedly receiving as much as five thousand dollars a speech. He wrote eight books and articles for many publications that included Newsweek
Newsweek
Newsweek is an American weekly news magazine published in New York City. It is distributed throughout the United States and internationally. It is the second-largest news weekly magazine in the U.S., having trailed Time in circulation and advertising revenue for most of its existence...
, Barron's
Barron's Magazine
Barron's is an American weekly newspaper covering U.S. financial information, market developments, and relevant statistics. Each issue provides a wrap-up of the previous week's market activity, news reports, and an informative outlook on the week to come....
, Commonweal
Commonweal
Commonweal is a American journal of opinion edited and managed by lay Catholics. It is headquartered in The Interchurch Center in New York City.-History:...
and the New York Times.
In 1989 Janeway published his final book, The Economics of Chaos. This book once again reflected the influence of the 1940s mobilization model on Janeway's thinking, as he called for mobilizing the country's hidden assets. Janeway arrived at diverse reform strategies by a reconsideration of U.S. economic history from Alexander Hamilton
Alexander Hamilton
Alexander Hamilton was a Founding Father, soldier, economist, political philosopher, one of America's first constitutional lawyers and the first United States Secretary of the Treasury...
to Ronald Reagan. He proposed swapping U.S. food exports for oil imports, and demanded somewhat protectionst
Protectionism
Protectionism is the economic policy of restraining trade between states through methods such as tariffs on imported goods, restrictive quotas, and a variety of other government regulations designed to allow "fair competition" between imports and goods and services produced domestically.This...
"reciprocity" in trade, whereby importers who penetrated more than 25 percent of a U.S. domestic market would be required to invest in American assets or buy U.S. products.
In The Economics of Chaos Janeway urged the United States Treasury Department to invest Social Security and other government trust funds more aggressively to generate greater benefits. Such improved benefits, Janeway argued, would coax millions of workers in the underground economy
Underground economy
A black market or underground economy is a market in goods or services which operates outside the formal one supported by established state power. Typically the totality of such activity is referred to with the definite article as a complement to the official economies, by market for such goods and...
to pay their taxes in order to receive the better returns of government-sponsored programs. Janeway's proposal to invest Social Security funds more aggressively anticipated present-day calls to privatize Social Security trust funds and invest them more aggressively in the stock market
Stock market
A stock market or equity market is a public entity for the trading of company stock and derivatives at an agreed price; these are securities listed on a stock exchange as well as those only traded privately.The size of the world stock market was estimated at about $36.6 trillion...
.
Janeway had other maverick proposals to halt the flight of workers and cash into the vast underground economy, which he called a three-ring circus consisting of growing numbers of people working off the books, the bustling Eurodollar
Eurodollar
Eurodollars are time deposits denominated in U.S. dollars at banks outside the United States, and thus are not under the jurisdiction of the Federal Reserve. Consequently, such deposits are subject to much less regulation than similar deposits within the U.S., allowing for higher margins. The term...
market and the illegal drug trade
Illegal drug trade
The illegal drug trade is a global black market, dedicated to cultivation, manufacture, distribution and sale of those substances which are subject to drug prohibition laws. Most jurisdictions prohibit trade, except under license, of many types of drugs by drug prohibition laws.A UN report said the...
. After The Economics of Chaos was published, Janeway's health declined and he suffered from diabetes and heart
Heart
The heart is a myogenic muscular organ found in all animals with a circulatory system , that is responsible for pumping blood throughout the blood vessels by repeated, rhythmic contractions...
problems. He died on February 8, 1993 at the Columbia-Presbyterian Medical Center in Manhattan at the age of 80.
Legacy and evaluation
In the 2004 book, The Fall of the House of Roosevelt: Brokers of Ideas and Power From FDR to LBJ, Janeway's son Michael recounted his father's place in history. In reviewing this book for the New York Times, the historian Michael BeschlossMichael Beschloss
Michael Richard Beschloss is an American historian. A specialist in the United States presidency, he is the author of nine books.- Early life :...
concluded: "What Eliot Janeway excelled at was keeping himself in the limelight and latching onto people who were going places. He did both of these things better and longer than most...During the 1970s and 80s, when men like (Abe) Fortas
Abe Fortas
Abraham Fortas was a U.S. Supreme Court associate justice from 1965 to 1969. Originally from Tennessee, Fortas became a law professor at Yale, and subsequently advised the Securities and Exchange Commission. He then worked at the Interior Department under Franklin D...
and (Felix) Cohen
Felix S. Cohen
Felix Solomon Cohen was an American lawyer and scholar who made a lasting mark on legal philosophy and fundamentally shaped federal Indian law and policy.- Biography :...
had faded into the past, the high-flying Janeway was starring in television commercials for Mazda
Mazda
is a Japanese automotive manufacturer based in Fuchū, Aki District, Hiroshima Prefecture, Japan.In 2007, Mazda produced almost 1.3 million vehicles for global sales...
and Glenfiddich Scotch
Glenfiddich
The Glenfiddich Distillery is a Speyside single malt Scotch whisky distillery owned by William Grant & Sons in Dufftown, Scotland. Glenfiddich means ‘Valley of the deer’ in Gaelic, hence the presence of a deer symbol on Glenfiddich bottles.- History :...
and slipping economic ideas to Jimmy Carter
Jimmy Carter
James Earl "Jimmy" Carter, Jr. is an American politician who served as the 39th President of the United States and was the recipient of the 2002 Nobel Peace Prize, the only U.S. President to have received the Prize after leaving office...
and Bill Clinton
Bill Clinton
William Jefferson "Bill" Clinton is an American politician who served as the 42nd President of the United States from 1993 to 2001. Inaugurated at age 46, he was the third-youngest president. He took office at the end of the Cold War, and was the first president of the baby boomer generation...
."
Another reviewer of Michael Janeway's book, Christopher Caldwell, saw Eliot Janeway in less flattering terms: "Michael Janeway writes that his father carried a boyish love of conspiracy into the New Deal
New Deal
The New Deal was a series of economic programs implemented in the United States between 1933 and 1936. They were passed by the U.S. Congress during the first term of President Franklin D. Roosevelt. The programs were Roosevelt's responses to the Great Depression, and focused on what historians call...
, working through 'backdoor channels, off-the-books agendas, manipulation of the system, sponsorship by powerful patrons,' even when he didn't have to...[Michael] Janeway is, again and again, honest about things that it is hard to be honest about, above all his father's gradual abandonment of the life of the mind for the life of influence, and his progress down the well-traveled road from political insider to political hanger-on."
Janeway's consistent pessimism also sometimes misled him in economic forecasts. In 1984, for instance, with a strong economic recovery in place that would continue for a number of years, Janeway asserted that the U.S. economy was "jammed into stoppage" and expressed his usual bearish opinions on its future course.
In honor of Janeway's contributions as an economic historian, Princeton University
Princeton University
Princeton University is a private research university located in Princeton, New Jersey, United States. The school is one of the eight universities of the Ivy League, and is one of the nine Colonial Colleges founded before the American Revolution....
endowed the Eliot Janeway lectures on historical economics. These have included James Tobin
James Tobin
James Tobin was an American economist who, in his lifetime, served on the Council of Economic Advisors and the Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System, and taught at Harvard and Yale Universities. He developed the ideas of Keynesian economics, and advocated government intervention to...
's 1972 lectures, "The New Economics a Decade Older," published in 1974, and Albert O. Hirschman
Albert O. Hirschman
Albert Otto Hirschman is an influential economist who has authored several books on political economy and political ideology. His first major contribution was in the area of development economics. Here he emphasized the need for unbalanced growth...
's "Shifting Involvement: Private Interest and Public Action," first published in 1982.