Grandfather Marcus

Speaking of footnotes and grandfathers, I also came across this paragraph and footnote in the book I'm editing:

The report [on Mises's heavily-accented English and subdued teaching style] highlights one of the reasons why he did not produce any outstanding students during his years in Geneva. An even more important reason was the typical mindset of the students at the Institute, who were eager to obtain employment in an international organization -- that is, in a government organization. It is safe to assume that such students were not especially receptive to Mises's message. His two best-known students from these years became experts in the economics of war: Stefan Possony and Edmund Silberner.[1]

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[1] Haberler later singled out J. Marcus Fleming and Alexandre Kafka. See Gottfried von Haberler, "Mises's Private Seminar" in "Erinnerungen an das Mises-Privatseminar, Wirtschaftspolitische Blätter, vol. 28, no. 4 (1981), p. 123.

[links and emphasis added]

J. Marcus Fleming was my Scottish granddad. For some non-obvious reasons, he is the Marcus in BK Marcus. I have very fond memories of him. He died in 1976.

After Geneva and London, he worked for the evil International Monetary Fund in Washington, DC, and was the Fleming in the Nobel Prize-winning "Fleming-Mundell Model" which you can read about here (in PDF format).

Granddad was the "Establishment Keynesian" I refer to in the About Me of this blog.

He was certainly one of those students in Geneva "who were eager to obtain employment in an international organization -- that is, in a government organization." It's safe to assume that he was "not especially receptive to Mises's message."

But still, that's only 2 degrees of separation -- and through family!

When I reported this to my mother, she told me that Haberler and granddad were friends and that she'd had dinner with Haberler when she was a girl.

And yet she'd never heard of Mises before I discovered Austrian economics...