Professor causes uproar asking Biden voters to unfriend him

[salin]

60. He'd understand.

Last edited Sat Nov 14, 2020, 10:59 PM - Edit history (1)

He left college after Pearl Harbor - anticipating a draft, he enlisted. Through the GI bill, he was able to get his PhD in economics at Harvard. He very much viewed the field as social science that could be used to improve/better the world.

His initial work was in anti trust and trying to define when the line was crossed into anti-competitive monopolistic behaviors that harmed markets. Mid career he was into applied economics into issues of public policy - such as forecasting costs and current and projected demand for energy, engaged students in that work and presented a study to the Indiana Public Utility Commission that projected that the costs of building and running a nuclear power plant would never pay itself off based on projected future demands/revenues. (Of course they didn't listen... it was approved and the project was a never completed disaster that I believe caused utility customers to pay higher prices to cover I think a billion or so $.) 30 years later we repeated the mistake with a Duke Energy plant.

His last domain work of work was on executive compensation - and how the ways CEOs received bonuses on quartlerly performance almost immediately was undercutting investment in R & D and longer term investment and planning, in favor of plans to gin up short term performance - he started this work in the early 80s and involved into looking at the possible role of institutional investors (think the size of CalPers) in voting in large blocks to seat people on corporate boards who favored changing top exec compensation by raising the annual salary and delaying the quarterly bonuses to start in year 5 (or so) - to encourage the longer range planning for the overall health/long term performance/growth of the company. Sadly he had cancer that cut off that work in the early 90s.

Point being, his work was borne from his training under faculty like John Kenneth Galbraith, from an earlier era - and work that didn't meld with the econometrics field (plus he may have just been an old dog, set in his ways, by the time that work took off), and the direction the Chicago School et al was at direct odds (all about ginning up profits - and none about long term growth) with his work and his view of the field of economics. There were a number of FDR influenced older economists here, back in Dad's days.

Thanks for the opportunity to reminisce, I have a warm smile as I type this.