Helge W. Nordvik In Memoriam

Abstract

Professor Helge W. Nordvik died suddenly on October 18, only 55 years old. He was trained both as historian and as economist at the Universities of Oslo and Bergen, and at the Norwegian School of Economics and Business Administration. Most of his post-graduate education was spent at the LSE in London, where he obtained his MSc in economic history.     

W. Arthur Lewis in Retrospect

This paper reviews several themes from the writings of W. Arthur Lewis, both the first black Nobel Laureate in Economics and the first from a developing country, and examines them from the perspective of two to five decades of hindsight. The paper emphasizes three main interrelated aspects; economic growth, economic dualism, and “the evolution of the economic order”—the forces that drive the prices of goods and relative incomes across countries. Lewis’s messages still resonate today, as he foresaw the rise of industrial exports from developing countries—and also that it would not end the large gaps among nations’ standards of living. The paper both documents these rises and asks whether one could have predicted it from information available in the 1960s, or whether additional prescience was necessary.     

The methodology of W. Arthur Lewis's development economics: Economics as pedagogy

Lewis's work represents much of the best potential of economic science. Like Keynes he has transcended not only the ideology of natural law cosmology, but also the positivist-guided focus upon the endless testing of minute hypothesis and the endless formalization of non-falsifiable bodies of doctrine. Courageously and pragmatically, Lewis attempts to verify his theory not just statistically or in terms of internal logical consistency, but more broadly in terms of its accordance with general social knowledge, history, and social relevance in instructing humanity how to live better. His implicit methodology suggests that economics at its best is pedagogy.