Monday, Apr. 07, 1980
BORN. To Jordan's American-born, Princeton-educated Queen Nur, 28, the former Lisa Halaby, and King Hussein, 44: a son, her first child, his eighth; in Amman. Name: Hamzah, after an uncle of the Prophet Muhammad.
DIED. Arthur Okun, 51, liberal economist and chairman of the Council of Economic Advisers under President Lyndon B. Johnson; of a heart attack; in Washington, D.C. Adviser to three Democratic Presidents and many corporate leaders, and a member of TIME'S Board of Economists, Okun was known for his handy formulations as well as his economic analyses. If the elusive recession ever comes, it will be identified by Okun's universally used definition: two consecutive quarters of negative G.N.P. growth. In the early 1960s he devised Okun's Law: for every 3% jump in economic growth, unemployment declines 1%; until the 1970s stagflation, the rule worked perfectly. Okun also invented the "discomfort index," the sum of the rates of unemployment and inflation. Okun's abiding concern was to control inflation without triggering recession and its grim results for the poor. Economic efficiency, he believed, must yield somewhat to social equality, or as he put it: "Society can transport money from rich to poor only in a leaky bucket."
DIED. James Wright, 52, winner of the 1972 Pulitzer Prize for poetry; of an undisclosed ailment; in New York City. His subjects captured quotidian images from his native Midwest, among them: "Crickets outside my window, cold and hungry old men, a red-haired child in her mother's arms."
DIED. Roland Barthes, 64, France's preeminent literary critic; of chest injuries he sustained when hit by a car five weeks ago; in Paris. In the first of his 13 books, Writing Degree Zero (1953), and in his masterpiece, Mythologies (1957), he argued that the dogmas, idols and "myths" of the middle class dominate literature and society at large because they are wrongly interpreted as the eternal truths of nature. All of literature, he said, is "a space in which a variety of writings, none of them original, blend and crash."
DIED. Dick Haymes, 64, buttery-voiced baritone and film star who sang with some of the finest of the swing era's Big Bands (including Tommy Dorsey's and Benny Goodman's), married often (six wives, including Rita Hayworth) and was probably known best for his renditions of songs like It Might as Well Be Spring; of lung cancer; in Los Angeles.
DIED. Franz Ingelfinger, 69, German-born physician whose work on digestive-tract physiology revolutionized gastroenterology, whose teaching at Boston University Medical School shaped a generation of disciples known as "Fingerlings" and whose wit as editor of the New England Journal of Medicine, from 1967 to 1977, made it the nation's main medical forum; of cancer; in Boston.
DIED. Gerald White Johnson, 89, reporter, columnist and author of more than 30 books on Americans and U.S. history; in Baltimore. Johnson was on the Greensboro, N.C., Daily News when Critic H.L. Mencken spotted him as "the best editorial writer in the South." After joining the Baltimore Sun in 1926, Johnson spent 17 years as a liberal, optimistic foil to Mencken's contemptuous conservatism. It was often said that Johnson wrote some of his best editorials in less than ten minutes; he completed books with no less facility. Among them were This American People (1951) and the series America: A History for Peter.
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