Donald Jasper Harris, OM (born August 23, 1938) is a Jamaican-American economist and emeritus professor at Stanford University, known for applying post-Keynesian ideas to development economics.

Harris's 1978 book Capital Accumulation and Income Distribution critiques mainstream economic theories, using mathematical modeling to propose an alternative model for thinking about the effects of capital accumulation on income inequality, economic growth, instability, and other phenomena.

[12] Harris grew up in the Orange Hill area of Saint Ann Parish, near Brown's Town[13][14] and graduated from Titchfield High School in Port Antonio.

[4][16] His doctoral dissertation, Inflation, Capital Accumulation and Economic Growth: A Theoretical and Numerical Analysis, was supervised by econometrician Daniel McFadden.

He took early retirement from Stanford in 1998 in order to pursue his interest in developing public policies to promote economic growth and advance social equity.

[3][4] Notable outcomes of this effort are the National Industrial Policy promulgated by the Government of Jamaica in 1996[35][36] and the Growth Inducement Strategy of 2011.

[41] After his talk, he met Shyamala Gopalan (1938–2009), a graduate student in nutrition and endocrinology from India at UC Berkeley who was in the audience.

[4] He has led a largely private life amid his children's rise to prominence, declining nearly all interview requests.

[45][46] Over the years, Kamala Harris has described her relationship with her father as cordial but distant, owing to her being primarily raised by her mother.