Remembering Jeffrey G. Williamson (1935–29 August 2026), and what he taught me about humility, honesty and showing up for students

The News

I was teaching economics to a class of final-year high school students and spoke about Jeffrey Williamsons work in economic history, when one of them found that Jeffrey Williamson had died a few weeks earlier.

I stopped for a moment. Most people would call Jeffrey a famous economic historian: a Harvard professor and the author of dozens of books. To me he was something rarer. He was one of the few teachers who really changed me, even though he never taught me a single class.