Thomas M. Doerflinger (1952-2015)

Somehow I missed the story that Thomas M. Doerflinger had passed away suddenly last August.  Long before writing about capitalism was cool, Doerflinger wrote an important book about the growth of the merchant community in Philadelphia.  His 1986 book A Vigorous Spirit of Enterprise delved the factors that led to the prosperous Philadelphia merchants in the early national period.  He focused on the personality and optimism and ingenuity of the merchants.  It made me think at the time -- a sense I've had many times since I first read it -- that a lot of our nation's smartest and most energetic people devoted their energy to making money.  I guess that's not a really surprising insight, but it's an important one.  His book was something I looked up to, as a study of the entrepreneurial spirit and how people confronted with lots and lots of challenges overcame them.  Stephen Girard -- who looms large in work I've done more recently -- starts the book in motion.  He entered Philadelphia under inauspicious circumstances and rose to be one of the most wealthy Americans -- and also a leading philanthropist, which is maybe not entirely coincidental.

Doerflinger had an unusual career trajectory for a historian -- after earning a bachelor's degree from Princeton and a Ph.D. for Harvard, he went to work on Wall Street.  There be became an important equity strategist at PaineWebber and UBS, and a blogger.  Cribbing now from his biography on his blog: 

His influential reports on thematic investing covered such diverse topics as income inequality, benign deflation, the virtues of dividend growth stocks and the threat to job growth posed by healthcare reform.  One of his reports was cited in the Republican presidential debates and posted on Senator Tom Coburn’s website. For over twenty years Doerflinger’s monthly forecasts of S&P 500 profits were widely followed globally.  During the three years Doerflinger chaired the committee managing the UBS U.S. Key Call List, it significantly outperformed the S&P 500.

Now many years ago, back when I was using the records of the Chester County iron works at the Historical Society of Pennsylvania, I learned a lot from his “How to Run an Ironworks,” 108 Pennsylvania Magazine of History and Biography 351-366 (1984).

Johns Hopkins University professor Philip Morgan has a memorial here.   I am away from Chapel Hill for a while, but when I return I look forward to sitting down with my copy of Vigorous Spirit of Enterprise and recalling the magic that Doerflinger put down on those pages.

Comments

[Carlton Larson]

Thanks for posting this, Al. I agree - Vigorous Spirit of Enterprise is excellent. It always seemed strange to me that Doerflinger walked away from a field in which he had such tremendous talent.