US economist who saw beyond textbooks

ANWAR SHAIKH, star critic of mainstream economics, died on October 7. He became an economist almost by accident, thanks to the searing glare of the Kuwaiti sands, where he began his career as an engineer at just 19, after studying to be one at Princeton. That stint gave him ‘desert blindness’, temporarily banishing him to a darkened room, where he was offered a job more suited to the Kuwaiti summer — of teaching schoolchildren. Teaching did two things. First, it made Anwar find his vocation, following in the footsteps of his mother, whom he described as a “gifted teacher with…