Francis M. Bator

Francis Michel Bator (Hungarian: Bátor Ferenc; August 10, 1925 – March 15, 2018) was a Hungarian-American economist and educator. He was a professor emeritus at Harvard Kennedy School of political economy.^[2] He was born in Budapest, Hungary. Bator attended the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and earned a Ph.D. in 1956. He was Deputy National Security Advisor of the United States from 1965 to 1967. He was also a Special Assistant to President Lyndon B. Johnson.^[3][4]

Francis M. Bator was Lucius N. Littauer Professor of Political Economy Emeritus in Harvard's Kennedy School of Government where he was founding chairman of the School's Public Policy Program, and director of studies in its Institute of Politics. Before coming to Harvard in 1967 he served as deputy national security advisor to President Lyndon Johnson covering U.S.-European relations and foreign economic policy. On the occasion of his departure from the White House, The Economist of London headed an article about his service "Europe's Assistant."

Bator's 1958 article "The Anatomy of Market Failure,"^[5] was recently described as "the standard reference" to the "approach [that] now forms the basis of …textbook expositions in the economics of the public sector." His 1960 book, The Question of Government Spending, was described in the Economic Journal "as a model of the sort of contribution which the economist can make to informed public discussion" and in the NYT as one of seven books that influenced President Kennedy's approach to the presidency.