Remembering Nina Shapiro

We are grieved to announce that Nina Shapiro, Professor of Economics Emeritus at St. Peter’s College, passed away on March 6. Nina was one of the first Levy Institute Visiting Scholars and a major contributor to the field of post-Keynesian economics. She passed away last week at the age of 71 from complications due to cancer.

Nina was best known for her work on the post-Keynesian theory of the firm and innovation, as well as the history of economic thought and macroeconomic theory. Her work was rooted in the tradition of Marx, Keynes, Kalecki, and Steindl. She was a deeply creative thinker who connected Marxian and Marshallian ideas on competition with the macroeconomics of Keynes and Steindl. An essay published at the start of her career—“The Revolutionary Character of Post Keynesian Economics” (Journal of Economic Issues, 1977)—made an enduring case for the rejection of scarcity as the basis for economic analysis. She was a founding member of the Editorial Board of The Journal of Post-Keynesian Economics and at the time of her death was at work on a book on the theory of the firm.

Trained in the nascent political economy doctoral program of The New School for Social Research with Edward Nell, Robert Heilbroner, David Gordon, and Anwar Shaikh, she was a part of the Rutgers University Livingston College program in post-Keynesian Economics along with Paul Davidson, Alfred Eichner, Bruce Steinberg, Lourdes Beneria, Robert Guttmann, Michele Naples, and myself. One of very few women in the field of post-Keynesian economics, she was a brilliant teacher of the history of economic thought and heterodox microeconomics and mentored two generations of Rutgers graduate students in economists, including Fernando Cardim de Carvalho, William Millberg, Andrea Terzi, and Radhika Balakrishnan.