Saturday, October 10, 2020

Kamala Devi Harris and the American Dream

 Senator Kamala Devi Harris is a formidable centrist candidate for Vice President of the US. As a prosecutor and state Attorney General, she built up a solid record on law enforcement, with a moderate commitment to judicial and police reform (far more evident in recent months than during her years in law enforcement). On healthcare, she is a centrist much in Joe Biden's mold. In fact, Biden probably picked her because she was so much like him in her politics ("simpatico" was his first criterion!). Like George HW Bush and Joe Biden, she has been picked because her presidential run exposed her to the whole country and demonstrated she was ready for the presidency even though she failed to win. Unlike Biden (who never led the polls in either of his previous runs for president, in 1988 and 2008), Kamala Harris was the Democratic front-runner for more than a month last year after her strong performance in the first two Democratic presidential debates.

Her Jamaican father (from whom she appears somewhat estranged) is Emeritus Professor of Economics at Stanford. He used to teach a popular course there in the Theory of Capitalist Development, and wrote a book on Capital Accumulation and its impact on income distribution. When Kamala was four, her father spent a year teaching at the Delhi School of Economics. When she was 7, her parents divorced.
Kamala's mother, Shyamala Gopalan Harris, had a PhD in nutrition and endocrinology from UC Berkeley, and was a reputed scientist who did cutting-edge research on breast cancer at the University of Illinois, University of Wisconsin, McGill University in Canada and at Berkeley. Kamala was born in Oakland, CA, and was exposed to her Indian (Tamil) roots through regular visits to India, but her mother brought her up as a black woman, taking pride in her black heritage (since that was the way she was going to be perceived in the US). Like Barack Obama, Kamala Harris has a sister called Maya.
Kamala went to Howard University (the leading historically-black university) in Washington, DC, and obtained her law degree from UC-Hastings. Her sister Maya obtained her undergraduate degree from Berkeley and her JD from Stanford Law School, a decidedly more brilliant academic record than Kamaladidi; but she had a child at 17, which complicated her life. Maya's daughter, Meena Harris, has gone on to graduate from Stanford and obtain her JD from Harvard Law School, published a children's book this year called "Kamala and Maya's Big Idea", and has previously served as Head of Strategy and Leadership at Uber! An amazingly accomplished family.
Kamala's maternal grandfather, PV Gopalan, worked in the Imperial Secretariat Service, rising through the ranks to become Joint Secretary to the Government of India. He was later sent on assignment to Zambia to head its refugee and rehabilitation office at a time when the new nation led by Kenneth Kaunda was facing an influx of refugees from Rhodesia (where a white-supremacist regime led by Ian Smith had taken over in 1964, and was to last until 1979, when the nation was renamed Zambia). Kamala apparently has fond memories of visiting her grandpa in Lusaka when she was a child.
The likely 47th President of the United States has been soaked in her Indian heritage. Let us hope it informs her policies too!

Tuesday, August 12, 2008

Remembering John Kenneth Galbraith (1908-2006)


Had I not received a letter from John Kenneth Galbraith dated July 7th 1983, I would not have perhaps chosen a career in Economics. Just the previous summer, the school library of St. Paul’s at Darjeeling acquired a new collection of books that included two books by John Kenneth Galbraith, The Affluent Society (1958) and The New Industrial State (1967). The astringent wit and elegant iconoclasm of John Kenneth Galbraith bewitched me in those years and this triggered a chain of correspondence between Cambridge and Darjeeling. I became a Galbraith aficionado early in life and began to read and collect everything that Galbraith wrote and lectured. I was disillusioned later in graduate school when I found the mainstream of academic Economics neoclassical and Samuelsonian that formed the basis of all higher education in Economics.


John Kenneth Galbraith personified through his life and work what Keynes called “a master economist.” A master economist who, according to Keynes (1933) “possessed a rare combination of gifts...” and could be “a mathematician, historian, statesman and philosopher in some degree.” John lived a complete and fulfilled life. He worked in the Roosevelt and Truman administrations, wrote speeches for Adlai Stevenson, served as ambassador to India during the Kennedy administration, turned down Lyndon B. Johnson's offer of the directorship of the Peace Corps, and as a self-described ''independent operator at the guerrilla level of American politics" played notable roles in the presidential campaigns of Eugene McCarthy and George McGovern. He was also one of the first and most vocal opponents of US involvement in Vietnam. According to John’s neighbor Anne Bernays, ''He was an incredibly smart man. He knew everything, he remembered everything, and he got you on everything. He always had the last word, but in a wonderful way." John was that Harvard economist, who revised each of his books at least five times and was as much a man of letters as a social scientist. John’s style of writing was rigorously burnished and was reminiscent of the 18th century Enlightenment philosophe. He was a thinker as devoted to crafting pellucid prose as shaping public policy. John titled his autobiography A Life in Our Times (1981) and his political career was encapsulated in his Annals of an Abiding Liberal (1979).


John enjoyed a lasting association with the Kennedy family. He was John Kennedy’s tutor at the Winthrop house in Harvard. He was a pillar of the New Frontier, and his presence did much to lend its academic cachet to John Kennedy’s administration. At the 1956 democratic national convention, Kennedy had narrowly lost the vice-presidential nomination, a loss owing to a stand on agricultural price supports John had warned against. Afterward, Kennedy told him, ''I don't want to hear about agriculture from anyone but you, John. And I don't want much to hear about it from you either."


As a reward for his work during the 1960 campaign, President Kennedy sent John to India to understand the mind of the Harrow educated Kashmiri Brahmin elite that was Jawaharlal Nehru. ''The job of an American ambassador," he later explained, ''is to maintain civil communication with the government to which he is accredited and, to the extent that personality allows, to personify the majesty and dignity of the United States. No one should suppose that this is either intellectually or physically taxing." Indeed, John managed to write no fewer than four books while in India: The Scotch (1964), Economic Development (1962), Ambassador's Journal (1969), and the first of his three novels, The McLandress Dimension (1963), which he published under the pseudonym Mark Epernay. He also began work on Indian Painting (1968). ''It is my only writing to which, to my knowledge, no one has ever taken serious exception" wrote John.


During the '50s John published a number of books: American Capitalism (1952) and A Theory of Price Control (1952), The Great Crash (1955), which one reviewer called the ''wittiest book ever written by a professional economist," and The Affluent Society (1958). The latter, with its critique of a consumer-driven economy of excess, made him a celebrity. It was translated into a dozen languages and went on to sell some 1.5 million copies. It also added a new phrase to the language, "the conventional wisdom," which John spent the rest of his life subverting. Two of John’s favorite novelists, Anthony Trollope and Evelyn Waugh, had a more discernible effect on his work than any economist did. Their wit, clarity, and keen eye were qualities he prized highly -- and consistently demonstrated throughout his own work.


In 1967, John published what he considered to be his most important book, The New Industrial State(1967). It, too, was an international bestseller, with its examination of ''the economic, political, and social theory of that part of the economy by now preempted by the large corporations." Along with The Affluent Society (1958), it formed a trilogy completed in 1973 with publication of Economics and the Public Purpose(1973). His worldliness and wide-ranging interests put him at odds with the ever-increasing specialization of contemporary economics. He received his colleagues' highest honor in 1971, being named president of the American Economic Association, but his fondness for the generalizing epigram and distaste for quantification meant his greatest following was among lay readers rather than fellow economists. Even more than John Maynard Keynes, it was Thorstein Veblen (1857-1929), the author of The Theory of the Leisure Class (1899) a classic amalgam of social science and social criticism, who provided John with his model: the economist as social critic. I must admit that I was profoundly influenced and indoctrinated by this model of an economist as a social critic, a reason that led me to James M. Buchanan’s Public Choice and Amartya Sen and Abraham Bergson’s Social Choice as my primary fields of graduate study in Economics.


John once wrote, ''I never imagined that there was any point to being an economist if no one was aware of what you were thinking" (1968). Many years later when I am running for the Mayor of my hometown in a part of the world where President Kennedy once sent John to represent his country, I am reminded of John and his role of an economist as a social critic. A role that I hope to play as well as I learnt from him as a reader and an aficionado.

Friday, December 28, 2007

James M. Buchanan and the Virginia School of Political Economy



In the second half of the 20th century, the Virginia school of political economy has emerged as an important research program that explores the boundary between law, economics and politics. Although that research program is now carried out by many prominent economists and political scientists around the world, the work and personality of James Buchanan has always played an important role in its development, and in its appeal. http://rdc1.net/forthcoming/jmbvap.pdf

"Buchanan's book, The Calculus of Consent (1962), co-authored with Gordon Tullock, is considered one of the classic works that founded the discipline of public choice, a melding of economics and political science. In particular (1962, p. v), the book is about the political organization of a free society. But its method, conceptual apparatus, and analytics "are derived, essentially, from the discipline that has as its subject the economic organization of such a society."

The Calculus of Consent argues that government decisions are part of the economy, not exogenous factors. Therefore, methods of collective decisions must be studied as part of the study of the public sector. Calculus further describes the constitution as the line that is drawn between private and collective action. Public choice is then divided between pre- and post-constitutional phases.

Buchanan has also written extensively on the theory of the fiscal constitution. His work The Power to Tax: Analytical Foundations of a Fiscal Constitution (with Geoffrey Brennan) was ground breaking on how fiscal decisions are made. Buchanan's writings have also challenged traditional assumptions about the role of self interest in political decision making.

Public Choice theory has evolved into two branches — a normative branch which attempts to derive principles of an appropriately organized set of public decisions, and a positivist branch which attempts to develop predictive theories of behavior.

Major Works of James M. Buchanan

The Pure Theory of Public Finance: A suggested approach", 1949, JPE
"Individual Choice in Voting and the Market", 1954, JPE
"Social Choice in Voting and Free Markets", 1954, JPE
Public Principles of Public Debt, 1958.
"Positive Economics, Welfare Economics and Political Economy", 1959, J Law Econ
Fiscal Theory and Political Economy, 1960.
"Externality", with W.C. Stubblebine, 1962, Economica
The Calculus of Consent: Logical foundations for constitutional democracy, with G. Tullock, 1962.
"What Should Economists Do?", 1964, Southern EJ
"Ethical Rules, Expected Values and Large Numbers", 1965, Ethics
"Economics and Its Scientific Neighbors", 1966, in Krupp, editor, Structure of Economic Science
Public Finance in Democratic Process: Fiscal institutions and democratic choice, 1967.
Demand and Supply of Public Goods, 1968.
"An Economist's Approach to Scientific Politics", 1968, in Parsons, editor, Perspectives in the Study of Politics.
Cost and Choice: An inquiry into economic theory, 1969.
"Is Economics the Science of Choice?", 1969, in Streissler, editor, Roads to Freedom
"Notes for an Economic Theory of Socialism", 1970, Public Choice
Academia in Anarchy, with N.Devletoglou, 1971.
"Equality as Fact and Norm", 1971, Ethics
"Before Public Choice", 1973, in Tullock, editor, Explorations in the Theory of Anarchy
The Limits of Liberty: Between Anarchy and Leviathan, 1975.
"Public Finance and Public Choice", 1975, National Tax Journal
"A Contractarian Paradigm for Applying Economic Theory", 1975, AER
"Barro on the Ricardian Equivalence Theorem", 1976, JPE
"Methods and Morals in Economics", 1976, in Breit and Culbertson, editors, Science and Ceremony
Democracy in Deficit: the political legacy of Lord Keynes, with R.E. Wagner, 1977.
"Markets, States and the Extent of Morals", 1978, AER
Freedom in Constitutional Contract, 1978.
What Should Economists Do?, 1979.
The Power to Tax: the analytical foundations of a fiscal constitution, with G. Brennan, 1980.
"The Homogenization of Heterogeneous Inputs", with R.D. Tollison, 1981, AER
"The Domain of Subjective Economics: Between predictive science and moral philosophy", 1982, in Kirzner, editor, Method, Process and Austrian Economics
"Order Defined in the Process of Emergence", 1982, Literature of Liberty
The Reason of Rules: constitutional political economy with G. Brennan, 1985.
Liberty, Market and the State, 1986.
"The Constitution of Economic Policy", 1987, AER
Economics: between predictive science and moral philosophy, with G. Brennan, 1988.
Explorations in Constitutional Economics, 1989.
The Economics and Ethics of Constitutional Order, 1991.
"From the Inside Looking Out", 1991, in Szenberg, editor, Eminent Economists
Constitutional Economics.
Better than Ploughing and other personal essays. 1992
"Economic freedom and competitive federalism: prospects for the new century", 1996, Nobelists for the Future
"Generalized Increasing Returns, Euler's Theorem, and Competitive Equilibrium" with Yong J. Yoon, 1999, HOPE
Collected Works of James M. Buchanan, 1999

Friday, December 7, 2007

Paul Milgrom and the Masterclass of Auction theorists

Paul Milgrom is the Shirley and Leonard Ely professor of Humanities and Sciences in the department of Economics at Stanford University. He is a member of the National Academy of Sciences, a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and the holder of an honorary doctorate from the Stockholm School of Economics.

Dr. Milgrom is an expert in game theory, specifically auction theory and pricing strategies. He is also the co-discoverer of the no-trade theorem with Nancy Stokey, and the co-founder of three companies: Market Design, which consults on the design of auction markets, Spectrum Exchange, which facilitates the exchange of radio spectrum toward those who will get the best use out of it, and Perfect Commerce, which provides support for electronic commerce.

Paul Milgrom and the Masterclass of Auction theorists

http://www.sss.ias.edu/publications/papers/econpaper44.pdf

Major Works of Paul Milgrom:


Milgrom, Paul (1979). The Structure of Information in Competitive Bidding. New York: Garland Press. (Ph.D. Dissertation)


Milgrom, Paul (1979). "A Convergence Theorem for Competitive Bidding with Differential Information". Econometrica 47: 679-88.


Milgrom, Paul (1981). "Good News and Bad News: Representation Theorems and Applications". Bell Journal of Economics 12: 380-91.


Milgrom, Paul and John Roberts (1982). "Limit Pricing and Entry Under Incomplete Information: An Equilibrium Analysis". Econometrica 50: 443-59.


Milgrom, Paul and John Roberts (1982). "Predation, Reputation, and Entry Deterrence". Journal of Economic Theory 27: 280-312.


Milgrom, Paul and John Roberts (1990). "The Economics of Modern Manufacturing: Technology, Strategy and Organiza­tion". American Economic Review 80(3): 511-28.


Milgrom, Paul and Nancy Stokey (1982). "Information, Trade and Common Knowledge". Journal of Economic Theory 26: 17-27.


Milgrom, Paul and Robert Weber (1982). "The Value of Information in a Sealed Bid Auction". Journal of Mathematical Economics 10: 105-14.


Milgrom, Paul and Robert Weber (1982). "A Theory of Auctions and Competitive Bidding". Econometrica 50: 1089-1122.


Milgrom, Paul and Robert Weber (1985). "Distributional Strategies for Games with Incomplete Information". Mathematics of Operations Research 10: 619-32.


Milgrom, Paul (2004). Putting Auction Theory to Work. Cambridge University Press. ISBN 0-521-53672-3.

Eminent advisees of Paul Milgrom:
Susan Athey, Harvard University, Winner of the 2007 John Bates Clark medal.
Joshua Gans, University of Melbourne, Winner of the 2007 Australian Young Economist Award.

Friday, November 23, 2007

Axel Leijonhufvud on Life Among the Econ

By: Axel Leijonhufvud
Axel Leijonhufvud made an enormous impact on macroeconomics in the late 1960s with the publication of his book On Keynesian Economics and the Economics of Keynes: A Study of Monetary Economics (1968). In this famous book, Leijonhufvud argued that the standard neoclassical synthesis (Hicks–Hansen IS-LM) interpretation of the General Theory totally misunderstood and misinterpreted Keynes. However, during the 1970's, interest in Keynes and Keynesian models waned as new classical equilibrium models became all the rage. Nevertheless, Leijonhufvud, from a position outside the mainstream, continued his research into problems of unemployment, business cycles, and inflation—issues that from his perspective are problems of coordination failure in complex dynamical systems. Axel Leijonhufvud is currently Professor Emeritus at the University of California, Los Angeles, and, since 1995, Professor of Monetary Economics at the University of Trento, Italy.

Friday, November 9, 2007

Bono in Economics department at MIT


"When the going gets weird, the weird turn pro," wrote Hunter S. Thompson (1971). Bono's visit to the Economics department at MIT surrouded by eminent economists Bengt Holmstrom and Abhijit Banerjee is just another instance where the weird rock star might have turned into a pro of development economics. Are we to expect a nobel prize for Bono for his promotion of development agendas at the grassroots level any time soon? Can MIT endorse him for such a prize? Is such a prize likely after the former U.S. vice president Al Gore received one for a similar type of contribution? Is the Economics Nobel Prize and the Nobel Peace Prize increasingly overlapping? If "Development is Freedom" as Sen has suggested (Sen, 2001), are we to expect that freedom to be our new Economic Imperialism? (Lazear, 1999) Is that good news for our profession?
http://faculty-gsb.stanford.edu/lazear/Personal/PDFs/economic%20imperialism.pdf
(Photo courtesy: Abdul Latif Jameel Poverty Action Lab, MIT)

Kaushik Basu on Globalization and the Politics of International Finance


Kaushik Basu is C. Marks Professor of Economics at Cornell University.
Following is his article on Globalization and the Politics of International Finance