Monday 7 January 2013

Abba P. Lerner

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Abba P. Lerner
Post-Keynesian economics
a
Born(1903-10-28)October 28, 1903
Bessarabia, Russian Empire
DiedOctober 27, 1982(1982-10-27) (aged 78)
Tallahassee, Florida
NationalityAmerican
FieldEconomics
Alma materLondon School of Economics
OpposedMilton Friedman, Barry Goldwater
InfluencesFriedrich Hayek, John Maynard Keynes, Paul Samuelson, Oskar R. Lange
Abba Ptachya Lerner (October 28, 1903 – October 27, 1982) was an American economist.
Lerner was born on October 28, 1903 in Bessarabia (Russian Empire). He grew up in a Jewish family, which emigrated to Great Britain when Lerner was three years old. Lerner grew up in the London East End. From the age of sixteen he worked as a machinist, a teacher in Hebrew schools, and as a businessman. He entered the London School of Economics in 1929 where he would study under Friedrich Hayek. A six-month stay at Cambridge in 1934–1935 brought him into contact with John Maynard Keynes. Lerner married Alice Sendak in 1930; they had twin children, Marion and Lionel, in 1932.
In 1937, Lerner emigrated to the United States. While in the US, Lerner befriended his intellectual opponents Milton Friedman and Barry Goldwater.

[edit] Accomplishments

  • Lerner developed a model of market socialism, which differed form the pure planned economy. It became known as the Third Way. By the 1960s Lerner began to distance himself from his early work on socialism.
  • Lerner developed the concept of distributive efficiency, which shows that economic equality will produce the greatest total happiness with a given amount of wealth.
  • Lerner (1951, Ch. 14) developed the concept of the NAIRU (before Friedman and Phelps). He termed it "low full employment" and contrasted it the "high full employment," the maximum employment achievable by implementing functional finance.

[edit] Notes

  1. ^ "What eventually became known as textbook Keynesian policies were in many ways Lerner’s interpretations of Keynes's policies, especially those expounded in The Economics of Control (1944) and later in The Economics of Employment (1951). . . . Textbook expositions of Keynesian policy naturally gravitated to the black and white 'Lernerian' policy of Functional Finance rather than the grayer Keynesian policies. Thus, the vision that monetary and fiscal policy should be used as a balance wheel, which forms a key element in the textbook policy revolution, deserves to be called Lernerian rather than Keynesian." (Colander 1984, p. 1573)

[edit] References

  • Colander, David (December 1984), "Was Keynes a Keynesian or a Lernerian?", Journal of Economic Literature 22: 1571–79, argues for the influence of Lerner's interpretation Keynes in "textbook" Keynesianism.

[edit] External links




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