Leonard Silk Nov 1985 Air date You Tube Compression

Leonard S. Silk, a columnist and editorial writer for The New York Times and for Business Week, who set a standard for a generation of journalists as a pioneer in making complex economic issues understandable to general readers, died Friday night at his home in Montclair, N.J. He was 76. Mr. Silk was a rarity in journalism: a reporter with a Ph.D. in economics, who taught the subject at a college level and worked in government before becoming a full-time journalist. He started at Business Week in 1954 and moved to The Times in 1970. Departing from the dense coverage of markets and statistics that characterized economic reporting in the 1950's, he found ways to describe, in simple prose, the economic forces shaping his readers' lives. "He was one of the earliest properly trained scholars who decided to devote himself to the problems of journalism and public writing about economics," said Paul A. Samuelson, the Nobel laureate in economic science. "And he had a gift for making the intricacies of economics understandable." Such clear reporting of complex issues is more common now than it was then. In pioneering the new style, Mr. Silk said his models were the science writers of the day, particularly William L. Laurence of The Times, who were making nuclear physics familiar to Americans. "I did not want to write down to people," Mr. Silk said in a recent interview. "I wanted to make economics accessible, just as science writers were making science accessible. I thought any idea could be plainly stated." As a columnist, Mr. Silk preferred to make his points through analysis and reporting, rather than outright advocacy. "I felt it should be an analytical column, but the logic should be so persuasive that you convince the reader this is the way to go," he said. Mr. Silk first heard the name of John Maynard Keynes at Wisconsin, and like many of his classmates he was taken by the Keynesian thesis that a stimulus from deficit spending by the government could revive the economy. Keynesian economics suddenly meshed with political action, becoming a powerful force that endured into the 1970's. Mr. Silk eventually shed his enthusiasm for Keynesian theory. He refused to lock himself into any set of theories or beliefs that became, as Mr. Silk put it, "more real than reality itself." What survived instead from those heady Wisconsin days was a view that government must step in from time to time to supplement or regulate free markets. Capitalism, he reasoned, needed to be saved at times from its worst tendencies. The goal of this process -- of economics itself -- should be to improve people's lives, he thought, by combining theory with human concerns. These remained Mr. Silk's guiding principles, and he restated them in his farewell column on May 29, 1992. "I see economics as a branch of philosophy -- moral philosophy as it was called in the days of Adam Smith," Mr. Silk wrote. "Its mission was and still is to improve the lot of humanity, especially for the poor."

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