Tag Archives: Profile of an Economist

Overview Paul Davidson took Keynes' General Theory of Employment Interest and Money seriously. The interpretation in mainstream textboooks misses important points. Keynes' book was about theory, not primarily about (short-run?) fiscal or monetary policy. Keynes does not explain persistent unemployment from imperfections or sticky or rigid money wages or prices. A general theory is one that has less axioms than the special case treated by, say, Marshall. Davidson identified, specifically,...

No book-length biography of D. G. Champernowne exists, as far as I can see. Even his Wikipedia page is quite terse. Yet he advised and participated in important twentieth-century intellectual developments. From Hodges biography of Alan Turing, I learned that 'Champ' was a friend of his. Champernowne did early work in programming chess-playing algorithms, along with Turing and Claude Shannon. Game-playing is one of those disappointing applications of Artifical Intelligence. What seems to...

I feel each of these three needs more than I am able to say. I find intriguing radicals attacking communist parties from the left, as Negri and others (Autonomia) did in Italy in the 1960s and 1970s. I draw on those who have all sorts of arguments with Solow. I find him witty. Thirwall I associate with Nicholas Kaldor and development economics. Antonio Negri (1933 - 2023). Repost of 2015 interview from Democracy Now. Libcom page of works related to Negri. Robert Solow (1924 - 2023): MIT...

I cannot write as much about these economists as they deserve. INET obituary for Victoria Chick. Her book, Macroeconomics after Keynes has a pun as its title. She is writing about macroeconomics that temporally follows Keynes and macroeconomics that builds on Keynes. The two do not need to be the same. Her book is good on the different time scales in the General Theory. Taking the short run to be when fixed capital ('plant') is given is different than defining the long run by given...

I have been inspired by Pasinetti's clear expositions. A lot of my work is an attempt to build on his theory of structural economic dynamics. Some highlights of Pasinetti's career as an economist: A derivation, in Pasinetti (1962), of the Cambridge equation, r = g/sc. Along a steady-state growth path, the rate of profit must be equal to the quotient of the rate of growth and the savings rate out of profits. This is an extension of Keynes' theory that investment creates the needed savings...

Barkley Rosser's professional contributions include the study of complex dynamics in economic models, development and transition economics, observations on the sociology of economists, and editorship. I knew him through Internet discussions and his editing of one of my articles. Peter Dorman has an obituary. Rosser's major book on complexity economics went through two editions. I am not sure I ever made it totally through his book. I think of him as building on, in the Post-Keynesian...

[embedded content]An Academic Lecture from Gintis I know of Herb Gintis more of as an Internet personality than through his work, mostly with Samuel Bowles. I also know of him as an important historical figure in one of those periodic purges of the Harvard economics departments. As I understand it, he went to Harvard for a graduate degree towards the end of the 1960s, intending to study mathematics. He was against the Vietnam war and fell in with a radical crowd. Given this interest in...

I think it should be well-known that the Keynesian economics in Paul Samuelson's textbook, for example, does not capture a lot of the theory in Keynes General Theory. Axel Leijonhufvud, along with Robert Clower, raised this point in the 1960s from a standpoint outside of the emerging Post Keynesianism of Sidney Weintraub, Paul Davidson and Keynes' immediate colleagues at Cambridge. I do not recall Leijonhufvud's book well. As I recall, much discussion occurred over the previous few...

This overview of Geoff Harcourt's work is insufficient. He was interested in economics as a means to a better world. Consequently, he offered political advice, sometimes in the form of 'package deals', in the context of Australian politics, which I know nothing about. Also, I do not know Austrian rules football, rugby, or cricket. Apparently, he was very good at mentorship and at introducing young scholars to the professional community. Capital theory is a very contentious topic, but...

I happen to have one book by Marty Weitzman (1942 - 2019) on my bookshelf. So I thought I would write a bit about The Share Economy: Conquering Stagflation. This is an ill-timed book. It proposes that firms negotiate with workers to pay them a percentage of revenues, instead of, say, an hourly money wage. It argues that such a change will address the widespread macroeconomic problem, throughout the 1970s, of simultaneously high unemployment and high inflation. But, by the time the book...