Nigel Harris (economist)

Nigel Harris (born 1935) is a British economist specializing in the economics of metropolitan areas. He is Professor Emeritus of the Economics of the City at University College London where in the 1980s he was Director for eight years of the Development Planning Unit at The Bartlett Faculty of the Built Environment. He is also a senior policy consultant to the think tank, the European Policy Centre, in Brussels, on the subject of international migration.

He earned his B.A. and M.A., both in Philosophy, Politics and Economics in 1959 and 1962 respectively, and his Ph.D. (thesis: The economic and industrial policy of the British Conservative Party, 1945-1964), in 1963, at London School of Economics.

Harris was, for a time, a leading member of the British Socialist Workers Party and edited their publication International Socialism.

In recent years he has done a considerable amount of work for the World Bank. Harris' greatest public prominence in the UK has been though his advocacy and defence of immigration in such works as Thinking the Unthinkable: The Immigration Myth Exposed (2001) and he is currently a member of the RSA's Migration Commission.

From State Capitalism to the National Capital Project

Early on Harris sought to develop the idea of state capitalism - namely that, both East and West, direct state control and support of the economy flowed logically from the nature of capital itself. His book Ideas in Society, while a wider account of ideology, looked at the ways that, at the level of ideas, these tendencies were expressed. His book on the attitudes of the British Conservative party to state intervention showed how, after World War 2, a positive attitude towards the state developed even within an ostensibly anti-statist party. His work on India and China explored this issue in poor countries. Most important here was his book on China, The Mandate of Heaven, which developed a full bloodied state capitalist analysis of that country.

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