Robert (Pat) D. Norton
Robert (Pat) D. Norton, an economist and author of several books on urban economics, died in Marblehead, MA., on June 20, 2020.
He arrived at Dartmouth from Olympia, WA., and from a background that made him feel like an outsider his first year. In looking back at his career, he credited his early feelings of provincialism to his life-long focus on how location and place affect economics.
“The amazing thing to me is how capitalism recreates itself in waves that rise, crest and ebb in diverse regional locales around the world. That mystery has been the underlying constanty in my intellectual history,” he wrote in Who’s Who in Economics.
After receiving a PhD from Princeton in 1977 he taught at Mount Holyoke and the University of Texas in Dallas. In 1985 he accepted an endowed chair at Bryant College in Rhode Island. He authored a number of books (City life-cycles and American Urban policies and New Urban Strategies for Advanced Regional Economies to name two titles) and edited anthologies on urban economics and policies.
Influenced by Joseph Schumpeter, he explored how Schumpeter’s ideas, like Creative Destruction, applied to the cities he chose to focus on.
After his first marriage ended in divorce, Pat married Dr. Gina Higgins, author of Resilient Adults: Overcoming a Cruel Past. As a second career he taught math in two urban public high schools (Chelsea and Peabody) and as he wrote in our 50th reunion book “I probably learned more than the kids did.” He retired after a five-year appointment as a researcher and writer for the American Institute for Economic Research in Great Barrington, MA Pat and I roomed together in 1964. He had returned from a year off as a meat packer and maker of corrugated board. Our roommate experience was cut short, however, after we helped the landlady’s daughter to pierce her ears with an ice cube for an anesthetic and soon after had to find other lodgings. Pat went on to become passionately interested in a variety of subjects from cybernetics to banking to Alfred Hitchcock movies.. In the early days of the web, he enlisted me to test out an online Hitchcock seminar/chat room. I will miss his wry, amused smile; whether it was aimed at me, the human comedy or the cosmos, I never knew.
Pat is survived by his wife, his ex-wife, his daughter Maya, his son Elias and two grandchildren.
— John Pappenheimer