author
William Zebina Ripley
1867–1941
A Harvard economist and public critic, he wrote forcefully about railroads, corporate power, and the economic problems of his day. He is also remembered for an influential but now discredited racial classification of Europe, which makes his legacy both notable and contested.
1 Audiobook
Railroads: Rates and Regulations
by William Zebina Ripley
About the author
Born in Medford, Massachusetts, in 1867, William Zebina Ripley trained first as an engineer at MIT and then earned graduate degrees at Columbia. He taught at Columbia and MIT before joining Harvard, where he became a professor of political economy and built a reputation as a sharp, wide-ranging scholar.
His career moved across several fields. Early on, he became widely known for The Races of Europe (1899), a book that tried to classify Europeans into broad racial groups. That work had a large influence in its time, but its racial theories are now rejected. Later, Ripley became much better known in economics for his criticism of railroad practices and corporate abuses, especially in the 1920s and 1930s.
Ripley died in Maine in 1941. Today he is remembered as a complicated figure: an important public economist who pushed hard for reform, and a writer whose earlier anthropological work reflects ideas that modern readers approach with strong caution.