Eastern report, includes Turgeon (long)

["J. Barkley Rosser, Jr." <rosserjb@xxxxxxx>]

       Folks, I unsubbed last week while going to the
Eastern Economic Association meetings in New York,
but promised michael before hand that I would report on
them.  Here it is.
      Of the four regional economic associations in the US
(Western, Midwestern, Southern, and Eastern), the Eastern
has for some time now been much more open to heterodox
approaches to economics, with a fairly strong tendency
towards the left end of the ideological spectrum, although
that is not absolute with various conservative and mainstream
types showing up as well.  This was quite true of these meetings
that happened in New York last week.  A few highlights.
      One group that has been meeting for several years now in
conjunction with the EEA has been the International Working
Group on Value Theory (IWGVT), run more or less by Alan
Freeman of Greenwich U. in England and Andrew Kliman of
Pace University in New York.  True to its name, the sessions
of this group involved many people from outside the US, as
indeed the EEA does in general much more than these other
regional groups in the US.  Freeman and Kliman are strong
supporters of the temporal single system (TSS) approach to
resolving the contradictions and difficulties of the Marxian
theory of value, and these annual meetings have become a
kind of running roadshow of the debates surrounding this
proposed approach that claims to resolve such problems as
the Transformation Problem and the Law of the Falling Rate
of Profit.
       I shall not go into a lengthy exegesis here of this stuff as I
know many on this list are not interested in it (which is
more regularly aired on OPE-L, run by Jerry Levy, who was in
attendance at the meetings).  But I can outline which of the
main players were there and how they currently stand vis a
vis each other.  Probably the three major critics of the TSS
approach who presented were David Laibman, of Brooklyn
College and editor of Science and Sociey, Fred Moseley, of
Holyoke College, known for his empirical estimates claiming
to show a declining rate of profit in the US, and Gary Mongiovi,
of St. Johns University and coeditor of the Review of Political
Economy.  Mongiovi is a strong defender of the Sraffian approach
and he and Kliman provided perhaps the sharpest clash of the
bunch, with Mongiovi characterizing the TSS approach as
"vulgar" while Kliman criticized the "physicalism" of the
Sraffian approach.
     One prominent figure who has participated in these sessions
and debates who was at the meetings but stayed out of this fray
this time was Duncan Foley, now of the New School.  He ran a
session on Sunday morning on Complexity theory that I participated
in as a last minute all purpose discussant.  The presenters were
three of his grad students, one of whom, Mishael Mikalac was
showing how Duncan's maximum entropy statistical equilibrium
approach (see JET, 1994) can be used to derive a power law
distribution that can be used to estimate different wealth
distributions.  He provided empirical estimates for several countries.
Chris Rude used entropy-based lottery theory to explain
financial markets in an argument I jumped all over (one conclusion:
"professional" traders do better than "amateurs").  Nelson
Barbosa-Filho of Brazil argued with a more straightforward
model ("no chaos theory here," he said) about how capital
inflows to a country with a current account surplus can lead to
an exchange rate collapse, and applied this to Brazil very
credibly.  I gave Duncan a hard time about the basis for his
entropy maximization argument, but I think he defended it quite
well.  Ken Koford of U. of Delaware, the editor of the Eastern
Economic Journal attended this session and apparently wants
to publish the papers from it in the EEJ as a symposium.
     Another group very much present were a lot of Post
Keynesians (the pkt list was very quiet late last week).  Ric Holt
and Steve Pressman have their New Guide to Post Keynesian
Economics coming out shortly from Routledge and are working
on some subsequent volumes.  One or the other of them chaired
a bunch of sessions that focused on empirical work along Post
Keynesian lines.  One especially interesting paper was by
Ronald Calitri of the New School (a lot of New Schoolers in
attendance) who was prophesying a major global economic
downturn on the behavior of a large number of time series.
      Another subgroup of Post Keynesians very present were
some from England, with seven from Leeds University alone,
led by Malcolm Sawyer who presented several papers with
Phil Arestis of South Bank U. in London.  They were in some of
the most heavily attended sessions that were on what is going
on in the EU with the euro and fiscal policy.  Jamie Galbraith
presented a paper in one of those sessions calling for the EU
to imitate the US in having community-wide social safety net
policies (hard to imagine the US as much of a model for such
things....  ).
       There were also several sessions on the "The Dijon School
of Endogenous Mustard, oops, I mean Money: Post Keynesian
and Circuitist Theories," with a faction from Dijon in Burgundy
there doing the spreading, although the godfather of these
sessions seems to have been mostly Louis-Philippe Rochon,
formerly of the New School (again!) but now of Kalamazoo
College.  However les grands fromages of this school were
not in attendance, who have been in the past and were last
summer at the last Post Keynesian Workshop, Alain Parguez
of Besancon and Bernard Vallageas of Paris-Sud.
      Also, there was a moderately noticeable faction from
U. of Missouri-Kansas City, with pen-l's own, Mat Forstater,
involved heavily in quite a few sessions.  A very well attended
one he ran mostly consisted of Robert Heilbroner criticizing
modern economics on various reasonable grounds.
      The presidential address was by Peter Kenen of Princeton
who has advised the Treasury Dept. under Clinton (know him,
Brad?) and who gave a talk on "Currencies, Crises, and Crashes."
The first 15 minutes sounded pretty interesting, but I had to bug
out to take my daughter to see The Lion King.
      There was also a lunch with Deirdre McCloskey that my wife,
Marina, said was very interesting, Deirdre doing her anti-statistical
significance and existence proof dog and pony show.  She was
also carrying her dog, Jane Austen, around in her handbag.  One
line from the lunch was that when she (then he) was 11, she dreamed
of being a girl and having no stutter and achieved one of those.
     Marina and I presented a paper (on the website, kiddies) on
"The Transition Between the Old and New Traditional Economies
in India."
     I also served as a discussant for a paper by the editor
of the Review of Austrian Economics, Peter Boettke of George
Mason University, on "Conceptions of the State in Post-
Communist Political Economy."  However, he did not show and
had the paper presented by his first year grad student coauthor.
So, I had to go easy.  I agreed with their analysis of why the
transition in Russia has been a mess, but I disagreed with their
conception of the state that somehow leaves out distribution....
     Finally, I chaired the roundtable session on Lynn Turgeon
that was advertised on this list.  This was very well attended and
very lively.  I noted Turgeon's "dialectic," his argument that demand-
constrained capitalist economies could be expanded by military
production while supply-constrained socialist economies would
be constrained by it.  There were a lot of personal reminiscences
about him by the panelists and the members of the audience,
including several of his former students and colleagues from
Hofstra University.  There is a paper available on my website
by the panelists that will hopefully appear in the American Journal
of Economics and Sociology, under the title, "Keynesian
Comparative Economics: The Iconoclastic Vision of Lynn Turgeon."
       One issue I brought up was the fact that Lynn was gay.  This
became an issue after his death because of a letter that Richard
Cornwall wrote that appeared in an URPE Newsletter that some
of you may have seen that denounced those who put out a
memorial pamphlet about him after his death for not mentioning this
fact.  Cornwall, who has published a long paper in RRPE on
Queer Theory, declared that Lynn wanted to be out (and about?)
on this and participate in Cornwall's own agenda on this matter.
However, we have not put any mention of this into our paper (after
much internal discussion) because of the fact that Lynn never made
any mention of it publicly in any speech or written outlet in his lifetime.
Ric Holt spent three days tape recording Lynn's recollections of his
life and work, and Lynn never mentioned it then either.  The closest
I ever saw him come to coming out was on the pkt list twice near
the end of his life when he brought up Keynes' bisexuality and
argued that Keynes' economics should be considered from this
perspective.  I suggested that this fact regarding Lynn may have
influenced his sympathy with the underdog, such as the gypsies
in Central Europe facing discrimination.  I note that Lynn had a
daughter and was still legally married to his wife, although long
separated, at the time of his death two years ago.
     There was also discussion of how Lynn should be characterized.
Although active on pkt and apparently sympathetic with many
Post Keynesian ideas, he never seemed to accept that label.
He did label himself in one of his books as a "classical Keynesian"
and as near as I can tell Keynes was probably the economist he
most admired.  His last book (1996) was titled, _Bastard
Keynesianism: The Evolution of Economic Thinking and
Policymaking since World War II_, that title drawn, of course,
from Joan Robinson very consciously.
      Lynn also labeled himself as a "revisionist" in his 1980
_The Advanced Capitalist System: A Revisionist View_.
That book contains lectures he gave at Moscow State
University in 1978 where he first met my wife Marina (he
introduced us).  I think that he used it to show his disdain for
the orthodoxies of both East and West.  The earlier versions of
our paper had that in the title, but it has since disappeared.
      Finally he also labeled himself as "iconoclastic" and
this certainly fit.  Those who knew him realize that he loved to
discomfit people with his unusual ideas.  Thus he would speak
of how Hitler had succeeded in applying Keynesian ideas.
He voted for Nixon in 1960 because he saw Kennedy as a
war mongerer who would expand the military-industrial
complex.  He supported the Reagan tax cuts.  I have noted
previously how he pointed out the low level of discrimination
in the late Stalin period, and he also defended the productivity
of collective farms in Eastern Europe, the better ag performance
in Hungary compared to Poland supporting his arguments which
even today remain largely unrecognized.
       Besides Ric Holt and myself, the other roundtablers were
Tim Canova of the law school at University of New Mexico,
and Robert Horn and Marina Rosser of James Madison University.
       In any case, many of us miss his wit and wisdom very much.
That's all, folks.
Barkley Rosser
http://cob.jmu.edu/rosserjb