Barkley-Rosser Jr. (1948-2023)

 

At the ASSA in San Diego, before the pandemic

It is hard to believe that Barkley has passed away. I met Barkley long ago, when I was still a PhD student in the 1990s, at the Eastern Economic Association Meeting, which still is one of the organizations that congregates both mainstream and heterodox economists with some degree of interaction. Perhaps the only such conference that still exists in the US. Barkley moved in between the mainstream and the heterodoxy. He should be seen, to a great extent, in the way he described the heterodoxy, as trying to break away from orthodox thinking. Although I disagreed about that definition as a description of heterodox economics, I think his definition reflected very well what he was trying to do.

His view of heterodoxy was based on the idea that the mainstream was ossified and didn't capture the complexity of actual economies. In part, he dealt with that by assuming non-linearities, and discontinuities and noting the unrealistic character of rational maximizing assumptions in a complex world. However, I think some of his most interesting work had an institutional character and was based on his joint work with his wife Marina on comparative economic development, in its third edition now.

He was the founding editor of the Review of Behavioral Economics, having been before the editor of Journal of Economic Behavior & Organization, he was interested in Econophysics (he wrote the entry for the New Palgrave). He was also a blogger for one of the oldest and best established econ blogs, EconoSpeak (a short entry after his death). He was, of course, the co-editor of the New Palgrave. A great loss for the profession and all that knew him.

Luigi Pasinetti (1930-2023)

Pasinetti, Garegnani and the president of Italy in 2010

Last week, in my senior seminar on the history of economic thought, I made the kids read a paper by Pasinetti on "Progress in Economic Science", which was published in a book edited by Boehm, Gehrke, Kurz and Sturn. It's a short defense of pluralism in economics on the basis of the co-existence of Kuhnian paradigms, with a relatively optimistic view of the possibility of progress, in a discipline in which, as he noted, the object of analysis is changing continually, the ideas of the researchers might affect the functioning of the object of study, and value judgments cannot be avoided, in part because they affect everyday material conditions. As he said: "It is enough to think of the devaluation of a currency, or of the movements of wages and salaries, to realize how deeply these phenomena affect everybody’s pocket."

Sadly Pasinetti has died yesterday. He was perhaps the last great name of the Anglo-Italian Cambridge School, that tried to put the works of the classical authors and Marx and the Keynesian Revolution together, and intimately associated with the work of Piero Sraffa. I remember reading a paper on how the school could be divided in a more Marxian strand (with Pierangelo Garegnani as the main author) and a Ricardian one, around Pasinetti. This also had political implications with Pasinetti representing the center right Christian Democrats, and Garegnani on the left, linked to the Communist Party. I once told that to Garegnani, who dismissed the idea of Sraffian schools.*

Pasinetti will be remembered for his work on the Cambridge distribution models, the famous Kaldor-Pasinetti model, the participation in the capital debates, and his work on a classical model of structural growth. Personally, his book on the theory of production (Lectures on the Theory of Production) and his discussion and critique of the Maastricht fiscal limits remain the two of his contributions that influenced me the most.

I should note that this comes after a series of deaths in the profession that have significantly affected the heterodox community, and me personally. Vicky Chick, with whom I was supposed to work for my PhD, and Jim Crotty, two of the more creative thinkers within Post Keynesian economics have passed. Also, on a personal note, Nilüfer Çagatay, my colleague in Utah, and Barkley Rosser, the co-editor of the New Palgrave passed away this month. The heterodox community is in mourning.

* The other would be the Smithian one, with Sylos-Labini as the main leader, and a Socialist bent in politics.