George Raymond Geiger (1903-1998): A Rich Life

ABSTRACT George R. Geiger, professor of Philosophy at Antioch College for fifty years, died March 19, 1998. He was a founding member of the editorial council of the American Journal of Economics and Sociology (1941-1998) and of the Antioch Review (1941-1998). He was also an advisor to and consulting editor of the Humanist (1955–59). He was the son of the founder of the Henry George School of Social Science of New York City and John Dewey's last doctoral student at Columbia University. Early on in his career he took up his father's cause, that of land value taxation; later he took up a defense of the contributions of his mentor, Dewey, and became in his own words a "journalist of philosophy."     

Braverman and the Structure of the U.S. Working Class: Beyond the Degradation of Labor

The fortieth anniversary of Harry Braverman’s Labor and Monopoly Capital is the occasion here for a reassessment of his work as a whole. Braverman’s analysis of the degradation of work is shown to have been only a part of a much larger argument he was developing on the structure of the U.S. working class. Building on his pioneering empirical research into occupational composition, a new empirical assessment of the structural evolution of the U.S. working class over the last four decades is provided, throwing light on current problems of unemployment, underemployment, and socially wasted labor—and the rights of labor.     

A Conversation with James O. Ramsay

Jim Ramsay was born on September 5, 1942, in Prince George, British Columbia. He pursued undergraduate studies at the University of Alberta, where he completed a BEd in 1964 with a major in English and a minor in mathematics. He then specialized in statistics and psychometry, earning a PhD in psychology from Princeton University in 1966. After holding a temporary lectureship in the Department of Psychology at University College London for one year, he joined the Department of Psychology at McGill University, where he rose through the academic ranks. He was chair of his department from 1986 to 1989 and spent sabbatical leaves in Cambridge, Grenoble, and Toulouse. He was named professor emeritus upon his retirement in 2007. Jim is the author of four influential books and over 100 peer‐reviewed articles in statistical and psychometric journals. He developed much of the statistical theory behind multidimensional scaling and is widely recognized as the founder of functional data analysis. Three of his papers were read to the Royal Statistical Society, and another won The Canadian Journal of Statistics 2000 Best Paper Award. The Statistical Society of Canada (SSC) awarded him a Gold Medal for research in 1998 and an honorary membership in 2012. Jim was president of the Psychometric Society in 1981–82 and president of the SSC in 2002–03. The following conversation took place at Jim's home in Ottawa, Ontario, on March 14 and April 4, 2012.     

H. G. J. as a Chronicler of the Keynesian Revolution: His Search of a Non Revolutionary Account

Repeatedly throughout his career, and especially when giving special invited lectures to national gatherings of economists, Harry Johnson reexamined the impact of Keynes's General Theory and its parallels with the revival of the quantity theory of money. This paper explores Johnson's changing view of the recent history of macroeconomics and particularly of the Keynesian Revolution, a term that he found problematic.     

A Conversation With Paul Embrechts

Paul Embrechts was born in Schoten, Belgium, on 3 February 1953. He holds a Licentiaat in Mathematics from Universiteit Antwerpen (1975) and a DSc from Katholieke Universiteit Leuven (1979), where he was also a Research Assistant from 1975 to 1983. He then held a lectureship in Statistics at Imperial College, London (1983–1985) and was a Docent at Limburgs Universitair Centrum, Belgium (1985–1989) before joining ETH Zürich as a Full Professor of Mathematics in 1989, where he remained until his retirement as an Emeritus in 2018. A renowned specialist of extreme-value theory and quantitative risk management, he authored or coauthored nearly 200 scientific papers and five books, including the highly influential ‘Modelling of Extremal Events for Insurance and Finance’ (Springer, 1997) and ‘Quantitative Risk Management: Concepts, Techniques and Tools’ (Princeton University Press, 2005, 2015). He served in numerous editorial capacities, notably as Editor-in-Chief of the ASTIN Bulletin (1996–2005). Praised for his natural leadership and exceptional communication skills, he helped to bridge the gap between academia and industry through the foundation of RiskLab Switzerland and his sustained leadership for nearly 20 years. He gave numerous prestigious invited and keynote lectures worldwide and served as a member of the board of, or consultant for, various banks, insurance companies and international regulatory authorities. His work was recognised through several visiting positions, including at the Oxford-Man Institute, and many awards. He is, inter alia, an Elected Fellow of the Institute of Mathematical Statistics (1995) and the American Statistical Association (2014), an Honorary Fellow of the Institute and the Faculty of Actuaries (2000), Honorary Member of the Belgian (2010) and French (2015) Institute of Actuaries and was granted four honorary degrees (University of Waterloo, 2007; Heriot-Watt University, 2011; Université catholique de Louvain, 2012; City, University of London, 2017). The following conversation took place in Paul's office at ETH Zürich, 17–18 December 2018.     

Examining the Federal Reserve

A bstract . Vritz Redlich (1892–1978) played a leading role in the development of the analytic approach in history and in establishing the new institutional history that combines entrepreneurial and business historv and sociology. A member, in economics , of the German historical school, he spent 16 years in the chemical industry before the triumph of Nazism forced him to emigrate from Germany in 1936. After teaching at various colleges until 1942, he spent the rest of his life doing research in the libraries of Harvard University , producing several notable works in economic history , including a classical study of American banking, and pioneering in entrepreneurial history.     

Harry Gunnison Brown's Advocacy

A bstract . Harry Gunnison Brown's fifty plus years of active advocacy of land value taxation are reviewed in the light of two recent articles. One indicates a waning interest and even understanding of Brown's chosen cause while the other demonstrates quite the opposite: the persistence and relevance of land value taxation. Brown's strategies are examined, drawing on his correspondence as well as his publications. It is suggested that evaluation of Brown's success or failure is a moot question in the sense that there was no one with whom to compare him.     

A Conversation with Roger Koenker

Roger William Koenker was born February 21, 1947. He graduated from Grinnell College in 1969 and obtained his PhD in Economics from University of Michigan in 1974 under the direction of Saul Hymans. He was Assistant Professor of Economics at the University of Illinois at Urbana‐Champaign (UIUC) from 1974 to 1976, and a member of Technical Staff at Bell Telephone Laboratories from 1976 to 1983 and returned to UIUC as Professor in 1983. He is currently a William B. McKinley Professor of Economics and Professor of Statistics at UIUC. He is best known for his seminal work on quantile regression, which has emerged as a powerful regression analysis tool across many disciplines. He is a Fellow of the American Statistical Association, Fellow of the Institute of Mathematical Statistics, Fellow of Econometric Society, and recipient of the 2010 Emanuel and Carol Parzen Prize for Statistical Innovation. The conversation covers part of Roger Koenker's career as an econometrician and statistician, starting from his college years.     

Foucault, HRM and the Ethos of the Critical Management Scholar

ABSTRACT This discussion reviews begins with a review of the uses to which Foucault's thought has been put in the study of human resource management, going on to consider – and to reject – a number of major criticisms of Foucault and Foucauldian studies of human resource management. Yet there remains much in Foucault's project that we seem often to ignore. Accordingly, the discussion considers the question of the articulation between Foucault's intellectual work and the practical, political spheres. Foucault conceives his own critical intellectual practice as part of a way of life analogous to the classical conception of an ethos. Adopting a loose and critical relationship to Foucault, the argument of the paper is that Foucault's ethos demands further attention as the possibilities for more practical and engaged forms of critical intellectual work have begun to be debated in management studies.     

A fractile programming approach with extreme sample estimates of parameters

Abstract This paper investigates the implications of extreme value estimates of net prices in the objective function of a linear programming problem. Analytically, our approach suggests interesting points of comparison between different measures of sensitivity of a linear programming problem, when a specified fractile of the distribution of profits is optimized.
Work done under the National Science Foundation Project GS-1810–420–21–17 at the Department of Economics, Iowa State University.     

Self-organized criticality in a herd behavior model of financial markets

This paper explains the fat-tail distribution of asset transaction volumes and prices by a model of rational herd behavior of traders. Each trader decides whether to buy an asset by observing private information and other traders’ actions. A trader’s buying action reveals his positive private information and affects the other traders’ beliefs in favor of buying, leading to strategic complementarity. A power-law distribution emerges for the number of buying actions in a static Nash equilibrium. This model provides an economic reason as to why the stock market has to exhibit a criticality in the connectivity of the traders’ actions. I am benefited by comments from the seminar participants at University of Tokyo and the Econophysics Colloquium 2006 at International Christian University, the editors of the special issue, and particularly an anonymous referee.     

Professor Ludwig M. Lachmann (1906-1990): Scholar, Teacher, and Austrian School Critic of Late Classical Formalism in Economics

Ludwig M. Lachmann was born in Berlin in 1906 and died in Johannesburg in 1990. For more than forty years, until his retirement in 1972, Lachmann established himself as a prominent South African economist and for a time served as head of the economics department at the University of Witwatersrand. From 1974 to 1987, he worked with Professor Israel Kirzner in New York City to give new shape and life to the older Austrian school of economics. Lachmann influenced a small army of modern Austrians to discard the elaborate formalisms of orthodox economics for a "radical subjectivism" that had its roots in the teachings of the founder of the Austrian school, Carl Menger. Here a small platoon of scholars offer their thoughts about Lachmann, his contributions to economic reasoning, and his eccentric but engaging character. First hand reports explain what their mentor taught and what his students took away. Lavoie makes the case that Lachmann's "radical subjectivism" took a rhetorical turn toward the end of Lachmann's career in New York City. In addition, Kirzner reports on his long and most productive relationship with Lachmann and provides additional insights about the seminal role of the Austrian Economics Seminar at New York University from 1985 to 1987 in giving shape to the modern Austrian revival. This article is the written version of a "Remembrance and Appreciation Session" held on June 28, 1999 at the History of Economics Society meeting at the University of North Carolina in Greensboro. It is one of an ongoing series that appears in the July issues of this journal.     

An Interview with Jae C. Lee

Jae Chang Lee was born in Chang‐Nyoung, South Korea, on 9 August, 1942. After high school, he attended Seoul National University during a period of military dictatorship. As a leader of the student protest movement, he was forced to flee the country. He completed undergraduate and graduate studies at Ohio State University (PhD 1972) in USA and then joined the faculty at Moravian College in Pennsylvania. He returned permanently to South Korea in 1981 to a faculty position at Korea University. He has held visiting positions at the US National Bureau of Standards, the US Naval Coastal Systems Center, Ohio State University, Temple University, the University of Wollongong and Chuo University. Professional contributions include President of International Statistical Institute, Organiser of the International Statistical Institute (ISI) Congress in Seoul in 2001, President of the International Association for Statistical Computing and of the Korean Statistical Society (KSS), Editor, Journal of the Korean Statistical Society and Co‐Editor, Computational Statistics and Data Analysis. Honours include ISI Methorst Award, Distinguished Service Award (KSS), Presidential Award for Statistical Contribution and Order of Service Merit from the Korean Government, Certificate of Distinguished Contribution from the Japanese Society of Computational Statistics and elected member, Korean Academy of Science and Technology. The interview was conducted during 23–27 April 2013, at Jae C's country home in Pocheon City.     

Books Reviews

Legge, Karen. Human Resource Management. Rhetorics and Realities . Macmillan Press, 1995, pp. xviii + 385 (Keith Sisson).
Joss, Richard and Kogan, Maurice. Advancing Quality: Total Quality Management in the National Health Service . Buckingham: Open University Press, 1995, pp. 215 (Alan Tuckman).
Von Krogh, G. and Roos, J. Organizational Epistemology . New York: St Martin's Press, 1995, pp. 214, ISBN 0-312-12498-8 (pb) (Robert Chai).
Caves, Richard E. Multinational Enterprise and Economic Analysis (2nd Edition). Cambridge: Cambridge Surveys of Economic Literature, 1996, pp. 322, £14.95 (pb), ISBN 0 521 47858 8 (Peter Buckley).
Prais, S. J. Productivity, Education and Training. An International Perspective . The National Institute of Economic and Social Research, Cambridge University Press, 1995, pp. xiv + 138 (Sonia C. Carey).
Scarbrough, Harry (Ed.). The Management of Expertise . London: Macmillan, 1996, £14.99 (pb), 0-333-56870-2 (Andrew Sturdy).
Undy, R., Fosh, P., Morris, H., Smith, P. and Martin, R. Managing the Unions: The Impact of Legislation on Trade Unions' Behaviour . Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996, pp. xvii + 318, £35 (hb) (John Kelly).
Wahl, Anna. Men's Perceptions of Women in Management . Fritzes: Stockholm, 1995, ISBN 38-30722-7 (Sandra Fielden).     

Clarence E. Ayres and the Legacy of German Idealism

Abstract . Based on the Clarence E. Ayres (1891-1972) papers at the University of Texas, this study traces the continuity among thinkers such as Kant, Hegel, Veblen, Dewey, and Ayres; the latter was a leading institutional economist following Veblen's death. Publicly acknowledging his intellectual debt to Veblen and Dewey, Ayres drew from these men some idealistic assumptions as well as the historicism that is implicit in his technological determinism or instrumental theory of knowledge. Thorstein Veblen and John Dewey owed a great deal to the philosophical tradition of idealism, regardless of the devotion to naturalism in their systems. The origins of Ayres's technological theory of value are found in Veblen and Dewey writings and back of them the legacy of German idealism. The vital link was a mutual acceptance that freedom was expressed in a cultural and historical form, realized in human activity. It was a process.     

A Conversation with Jef Teugels

Jozef Lodewijk Maria Teugels was born in Londerzeel, Belgium, on February 20, 1939. He received his high school education at Sint-Lievenscollege in Antwerp. He obtained a Candidate diploma in Physics in 1961 and a License degree in Mathematics in 1963 at the Catholic University of Louvain. After serving one year in the army, he obtained his MSc in 1966 and his PhD in 1967 at Purdue University, with Marcel F. Neuts as advisor. In 1967 he was appointed at the Catholic University of Louvain and promoted to Full Professor in 1973. He remained in Leuven until his retirement in 2004. He chaired the Department of Mathematics over the periods 1970–77 and 1982–89. He has held visiting positions at numerous universities in the United Kingdom, Portugal, the United States of America, South Africa, Japan, Indonesia and Australia.     

CLIMATE CHANGE ISSUES: A DISSENTING VOICE

(The text which follows formed the basis for a brief presentation to a conference held on 22 April 2009 at the Said Business School, Oxford University. The subject of the conference was 'Beyond Kyoto – Green Innovation and Enterprise in the 21st Century'.)
Governments across the world are mishandling climate change issues. The content, the orientation, and in particular the basis and rationale of current policies to curb emissions of (so-called) 'greenhouse gases', are all open to serious question.     

REVIEWS

Book reviewed in this article:
Social Control of Industrial Monopoly Corporate Concentration and Public Policy. By Harry L. Purdy, Martin L. Lindahl, and William A. Carter.
United States Foreign Policy: Shield of the Republic, By Walter Lippmann
The Theory of Prices, Vol. II By Arthur W. Marget.
From Economic Theory to Policy, By E. Ronald Walker.
The Garment of God: The htfittence of Nature in HnmaTt Experience. By John C. Merriam.
Jack Jones, Fisherman-Philosopher, By Helen Swift.
The Blockade of Germany after the Armistice, 1915–1919. By Suda Lorena Bane and Ralph Haswell Lutz.
Christianity and the Family, By Ernest R. Groves     

Keeping Work in Perspective: Work–Nonwork Considerations and Applicant Decision Making

The work–nonwork supportiveness of an organization may influence applicant decision making among young applicants. This possibility was tested using a phased narrowing decision making task and three organizational attributes (salary, number of work–nonwork supportive policies/benefits and their related culture supportiveness). Data gathered from a sample of 110 graduating college business majors partially supported the hypotheses (p < 0.05), revealing a dynamic influence of the organizational attributes across decision making stages and a differential impact of the attributes depending on their framing as family-friendly or life-friendly. Salary was especially important in initial screening of organizational options, and the organizational culture support of work–nonwork challenges was increasingly influential as the final choice was formed. Implications for young applicant attraction are discussed. The research presented here (a portion of the author’s master’s thesis at Bowling Green State University) was presented at the 2006 Annual Conference of the Society for Industrial and Organizational Psychology in Dallas, TX. Thanks go to Dr. Steve M. Jex, Dr. Scott Highhouse, and Dr. Cathy Stein for their assistance in the development of this study. Thanks are also owed to Dr. Michael Doherty for his thoughtful comments on an earlier draft.     

Joshua K. Ingalls, American Individualist: Land Reformer, Opponent of Henry George and Advocate of Land Leasing, Now an Established Mode

A bstract . Joshua K. Ingalls was a member of a particularly cohesive group of 19th century intellectual iconoclasts in America, the individualists. Two controversies made him widely known at the time: the land reform vs. abolition argument before the Civil War, and his attacks on Henry George in the 1880s over the issue of land reform through tax reform or land reform through land leasing under an occupancy and use system of tenure. Ingalls held George failed to understand the "true" nature of capitalism; rent goes to the landlord as capitalist as reward for his investment; the landowning capitalist appropriates this by his dominion over the land. Though Ingalls' argument did not prevail, land leasing, which he advocated, is the form in which some resources are now disposed of, as in grazing rights and mineral exploration on public land, and in oil exploration rights on the continental shelves; and in the disposition of urban sites such as the site of Rockefeller Center and the Chrysler Building in New York (the former to the benefit of Columbia University, the latter Cooper Union, both by legislative action).