Paul Douglas - Academia and Family Life

Academia and Family Life

Douglas graduated from Bowdoin College with a Phi Beta Kappa key in 1913. He then moved on to Columbia University, where he earned a master's degree in 1915 and a Ph.D. in economics in 1921. In 1915, he married Dorothy Wolff, a graduate of Bryn Mawr College who also earned a Ph.D. at Columbia University.

From 1915 to 1920, the Douglases moved six times. Paul studied at Harvard University; taught at the University of Illinois and at Oregon's Reed College, served as a mediator of labor disputes for the Emergency Fleet Corporation of Pennsylvania and taught at University of Washington. When working for the Emergency Fleet Corporation he read John Woolman's journals. When teaching in Seattle, he joined the Religious Society of Friends.

In 1919, Douglas took a job teaching economics at the University of Chicago. Although Douglas enjoyed his job, his wife was unable to obtain a job at the university due to anti-nepotism rules. When she obtained a job at Smith College, in Massachusetts, she persuaded her husband to move the family there. He would then start teaching at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. Douglas soon decided that the marriage situation was untenable and, in 1930, the couple divorced, with Dorothy taking custody of their four children and Douglas returning to Chicago. The following year, Douglas met and married Emily Taft Douglas, daughter of sculptor Lorado Taft and distant cousin of former President William Howard Taft. Emily was a political activist, former actress, and subsequent one-term congresswoman at-large from Illinois (1945–47).

Douglas was listed as a supporter of banking reforms suggested by University of Chicago economists in 1933 that were later referred to as the "Chicago plan". In 1939, he coauthored with five other notable economists a draft proposal titled A Program for Monetary Reform. The Chicago plan and A Program for Monetary Reform generated much interest and discussion among lawmakers, but the suggested reforms did not result in any new legislation.

Douglas is probably best-known to economics students as the co-author of the 1928 article with Charles Cobb that first laid out the Cobb-Douglas production function.