"How Dr. King Shaped My Work in Economics" by JOSEPH E. STIGLITZ at the NY Times

[applegrove]

How Dr. King Shaped My Work in Economics

By JOSEPH E. STIGLITZ at the NY Times

http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/08/27/how-dr-king-shaped-my-work-in-economics/?hp&_r=0

"SNIP..........................


It was because I hoped that something could be done about these and the other problems I had seen so vividly growing up in Gary, Ind. — poverty, episodic and persistent unemployment, unending discrimination against African-Americans — that I decided to become an economist, veering away from my earlier intention to go into theoretical physics. I soon discovered I had joined a strange tribe. While there were a few scholars (including several of my teachers) who cared deeply about the issues that had led me to the field, most were unconcerned about inequality; the dominant school worshiped at the feet of (a misunderstood) Adam Smith, at the miracle of the efficiency of the market economy. I thought that if this was the best of all possible worlds, I wanted to construct and live in another world.

In that odd world of economics, unemployment (if it existed) was the fault of workers. One Chicago School economist, the Nobel Prize winner Robert E. Lucas Jr., would later write: “Of the tendencies that are harmful to sound economics, the most seductive, and in my opinion the most poisonous, is to focus on questions of distribution.” Another Nobel laureate of the Chicago School, Gary S. Becker, would attempt to show how in truly competitive labor markets discrimination couldn’t exist. While I and others wrote multiple papers explaining the sophistry in the argument, his was an argument that fell on receptive ears.

Like so many looking back over the past 50 years, I cannot but be struck by the gap between our aspirations then and what we have accomplished.

True, one “glass ceiling” has been shattered: we have an African-American president.




........................SNIP"