Edward S. Herman’s Life and Work – Part 1

Ed’s life and professional career

When I first published my biography of Edward S. Herman, it came up as the second result at Google.  As ideology and corruption took precedence at Google, my bio of Ed got de-ranked to oblivion.  It is the only substantial and credible bio of Ed on the Internet, but it is not suitable for Google’s users.  I performed the exercise again just now (searching for “Edward S. Herman”), and I went through all of the pages that Google serves up (to page 28, or nearly 300 results), and my Ed bio did not appear at all.  I wondered if I had been banished from Google altogether and searched under “Edward S. Herman biography,” and it came up on page seven, more than 60 results deep.  I performed the “Edward S. Herman” exercise in DuckDuckGo, and my bio of Ed came in at about the 600^th result.  Google has become an obscene caricature of a search engine, and we’ll see how the proposed breakup goes, but it seems like all of the search engines are corrupt.  Of course Wikipedia’s libelous bio of Ed is always the first result for any search engine. 

So, I will do what I just did for Brian O’Leary and write at Substack about Ed’s life and work.  I was Brian’s friend and colleague, while I was more Ed’s fanboy.  We interacted a fair bit in his life’s last 16 years, but it was only an email relationship.  Brian and I had many overlaps in our lives, which could seem eerie at times.  Ed and I also had some overlaps, which I will cover during this exercise. 

Ed was born in Philadelphia, like his pal Noam Chomsky was, and Ed spent nearly his entire life in Philly.  Like Noam, Ed was Jewish, born in 1925, so his childhood was marked by the Great Depression, rise of Hitler, and the Holocaust.  Ed was raised by liberal-democrat parents and he had some radical cousins.  He got his doctorate in economics at Berkeley, because of the left-wing analysts there, especially Robert Brady, Leo Rogin, and Joe Bain.  Bain’s work influenced Ed’s thinking on corporate structures and helped him develop his Propaganda Model. 

Ed was married to his first wife for 67 years, until her death in 2013.  Ed never had any children.  Ed fed stray cats and loved playing piano music, especially that of Mozart, Haydn, and Scarlatti.  Ed’s only known indulgences were good French food and imbibing red wine after a day of study and writing. 

Ed got a job at Wharton in 1958 and spent the rest of his career there.  At Wharton, the finance department performed studies for the federal government.  The first was a study of mutual funds for the Securities and Exchange Commission.   A chief finding was that mutual funds were worthless, as far as stock picking went.  This was the first overlap with Ed in my life, as I read about that study in business school.  I vividly remember reading about the “monkey fund,” in which a chimpanzee was given darts, in the wake of Wharton’s study, to throw at a page of stock listings, and the stocks picked by the darts became the “monkey fund,” which outperformed most mutual funds. 

A few years later, Wharton performed a study of savings-and-loan banks (for another overlap with my life), and Ed wrote the chapter on conflicts of interest.  The savings-and-loan industry specifically called a press conference to dispute Ed’s chapter, which Ed was pleased to see, as it showed how much he got under their skin.  In 1981, Ed published a book on corporate power relationships, and Ed credited it with helping him develop his Propaganda Model. 

I am the only accountant that I know of who has publicly called out the fatal conflict of interest in the financial-auditing profession.  The public cannot expect that companies can hire their regulators, if they want the regulatory results to be meaningful.  The only time that I ever saw anybody else write about it was Ed.  One pal went to Wharton, Ed taught one of his economics classes, and my pal had high praise for Ed. 

Ed’s first political book came out in 1966, but it had no professional repercussions, as Ed was a highly competent professor who regularly published.  Ed knew how to play the professor game.  Ed later said that he got lucky, coming up when he did.  Today, professors who do what Ed did can often kiss their careers goodbye, as happened to Ward Churchill and many others.  Ed retired in 1989, and the next decade was his busiest as a writer.  The next year, I began to study at his and Noam’s scholarly feet. 

As with my posts on Brian, this will take several posts to give some justice to Ed’s life.