To the Lighthouse in Uncertainty

Harvard Professor Richard Cooper and International Cooperation

When coronavirus fears pummel the world, when the likelihood of panic, misunderstanding, and division is increased, multilateral cooperation has been reaffirmed. The joint statement released after the meeting of Leaders from the Group of Seven (G7) claimed to make the year of 2021 a turning point for multilateralism. Approximately within one month, China and the U.S. both officially confirmed that China’s foreign minister, Wang Yi, and its top diplomat, Yang Jiechi, and U.S.’ Secretary of State Antony J. Blinken, and President Biden’s national security adviser, Jake Sullivan will meet on March 18 in Anchorage. The news of this sort, though exploring new multilateralism to restore mutual trust, and credibility, and to exercise future-oriented, international outlook leadership is confronting various new questions, delivers positive core messages, and give people hope.

That identifies Richard Cooper’s study of international cooperation of public policy (far beyond macroeconomic policy), which had a key role in shaping multinational fiscal-policy and coordination objectives in the 1970s, and was accepted as the original foundation of study of international cooperation in economics is still an important inspiration to the policymakers today.

Cooper’s vision for international cooperation is that of a historical sociological economics. His studies are truly interdisciplinary and yet synergistic. He was such able to awaken to the interdependence of different knowledge that allowed him to be always curious about different viewpoints and experiences. In this sense, he made himself an excellent representative to explain the spirit of the world’s-class university. A good example, Peter Salovey, president of Yale University, described the core values of Yale as culture of curiosity, and that his speech reminds me of Cooper’s character and his connections with Yale —“He taught economics at Yale and was provost there from 1972-74”.

What makes Cooper a trailblazer? According to his studies of China, one of his two major research interests in recent years in addition to climate change policy, three major elements—history, involvement, and vision—hold the key.

He believed that nobody can understand the present without a keen understanding of the past. In his class on the transformation of China’s economic policy since the 1978 Reform and Opening up, he held that by understanding the historical relationship rather than simply historical context between the events, researchers can explain the laws or principles behind the observed phenomena, and can then predict what the future holds.

In doing so, Cooper argued that the laws or principles of economy, and then of the socio-economic world in a broader sense may not be explained only through creating a science of economics in spite of his encouragement on the application of scientific techniques to the economic world. That is, no theories, models, and mathematical techniques, of course, can reveal the whole picture of real world. In this sense, Cooper who spent four years in Frankfurt, Germany, was in much the same way that Goethe did. The globally well-known masterpiece, Faust was used as an analogy in his speech for the Chinese students to make it clear that —“All theory is grey; but the precious tree of life is green (Grau, teurer Freund, ist alle Theorie, Und grün des Lebens goldner Baum)”.

In keeping with this view, Cooper travelled widely so as to see the world through his eyes, in particular the developing countries which have been rarely covered by the universities in the First World. To him, the fieldwork can provide richer and more in-depth information than single “mathematics”. Therefore, the various first-hand studies of people other than big data were commonly employed in his keynote speeches, presentations, and classes. His Chinese audience, in particular, the Chinese entrepreneurs were actually in the end impressed with the participant observation and felt that Cooper is an American economist but relevant to the real life of the Chinese.

Cooper’s research though in different historical contexts has always been focused on cooperation or coordination. With China’s economic growth, the argument that is the so-called win-win strategy feasible has become a global concern. In face of the various uncertainty, particularly, when misunderstanding, cynicism, and disengagement somehow outpace the efforts to correct them, Cooper’s publications and associate research for more than 60 years should be reread by China, and the world. In this sense, he is forward-looking. Cooper’s visionary was grounded in his international perspective instead of the narrow national interest. Cooper in his paper, “Economic Interdependence and War” documented three Globalizations in human history: The first globalization in the 16th century; the period 1870-1913 was the second globalization; the third globalization, “the great period of globalization” since the 1970s.

Regarding what makes the third globalization a “great period”, former president of the London School of Economics and Political Science (LSE), Anthony Giddens’ comments in his Sociology (3rd Edition) (2004) where Cooper received his MA as a Marshall Scholar actually echoed this viewpoint that “globalization opens our eyes to the fact that the increasing ties between the local and global, it means [in the context of globalization], our actions and behavior will have the consequences for the others, and the world’s problems will have the consequences for us”.

In short, like the other economists, Cooper was preoccupied with the hot-button issues in his own lifetime. He was, however, particularly interested in establishing collaborative and coordinated system or mechanism—in other words, what can hold the world (beyond economic field) together. Thus, he concentrated on the factors positive to unifying. His article “A Glimpse of 2020” wrote with high confidence the four factors significant to celebration of the future. The increasing international mobility is stressed as always. To that end, the strongest asset of Cooper’s economic studies is humanity. He is great, as Auguste Comte, a founder of sociology identified the goal of academics—“Love as principle, order as basis, progress as end”.

Given the above, Cooper cannot simply be labelled an economist; he is an individual of wide interests and concerns. To the academia, particularly emerging or mid-career, he is like Virginia Woolf’s To the Lighthouse… …So long lives his ideas. For the sake of that, his article on the female political leaders is included in the textbook (I am the editor-in-chief) Intelligent Reading of Culture and will reach the Chinese undergraduates in this new year of 2021 through Peking University Press, the university that Cooper regularly visited.

Liu Chen is the professor of Public Administration and Cultural Studies, Beijing Foreign Studies University. Harvard Kennedy School Mason Fellow, Postdoctoral Fellow, Graduate School of Arts and Sciences, Harvard supervised by Professor Richard N. Cooper. Listed on Role Model of Beijing (2020), and Women’s Excellence Medal of Beijing Municipality (March 8 Red-banner Medal) (2020). Her research focuses on policy, practice, leadership, and culture and international cooperation.

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