Hamilton, David Boyce, 1918-....

David Hamilton taught economics at UNM from 1949 to 1987. Born in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania on August 31, 1918, he earned his MA from the University of Pittsburgh in 1941 and his Ph.D. from the University of Texas in 1951. His areas of expertise included consumer and institutional economics and he was also an interdisciplinary scholar who taught classes in social studies and researched the evolutionary roots of economic behavior. Books authored by Hamilton include The Consumer in Our Economy (1962), A Primer on the Economics of Poverty (1968), and Cultural Economics and Theory: The Evolutionary Economics of David Hamilton (2009). The first of these set off a firestorm of controversy when it was published as an upper division textbook during the early 1960s, a period when the Cold War red-baiting of the 1950s reappeared with new vigor. Hamilton reflects in his history of the UNM Economics Department (1989) that “for reasons that remain somewhat obscure" critics accused him and his book of being “dangerous" and “subversive." This prompted University President Thomas Popejoy to make a famous speech in support of academic freedom to the New Mexico American Legion in Carlsbad, New Mexico.