Some people I admire

From time to time, I'm going to write a bit more about economics. This time I will focus on listing some of the people I've been influenced by over the last year and a half or so (which is when I really began to learn a little economics), and give a brief reason why. One funny consistency amongst all of the following is that they have all been controversial, but creative in a way that seems frustratingly other-wordly.

Ronald Coase: for having the courage to question the (later fully completed) general equilibrium model for failing to describe the forms that firms take in the real world, and making the observation that prices cannot be the only parameters that determine allocation of resources. Also for making the observation (in 1960) that lawyers think about externalities in a more sensible manner than how economists were doing so (back then), another observation that has been revolutionary. These two papers have a combined citation account of ~30,000 - the highest by very, very far.













Oliver Williamson: for pioneering almost (but not quite) in a single handed manner, the field of (what I will call) "Comparative Economic Governance forms in an Industrial sense". The first to give us an analytical framework within which to understand the organization of the firm (and if firms organize at all) - the field of inquiry begun by Coase. Most importantly, for telling us the "firm" (i.e. planning) and the "market" (the "free market") are both flawed ways of organizing, but each can be okay depending on what the parameters of the situation are.













Jim Heckman: for describing a technique to solve the selection problem - some people may earn zero wages because they value staying at home, the ignorance of this problem leads to wrong estimates, thus regression models need to account for this. This is one of the earliest - perhaps the first - examples of the bridge between structural and reduced-form models. The imagination required for this is difficult to communicate.















Peyton Young: for incorporating social norms with (traditional) economic modeling to figure out a equilibrium concept (with Dean Foster) and using it to produce a beautiful, compelling analysis (along with Mary Burke) of the role of custom and competition in the organization of agricultural crop-sharing contracts. One of the most exciting economists around at this time and very active. Unlike your freakonomists, his understanding of sociology mirrors that of Becker's, and the incorporation of the thoughts of other disciplines is done in a systematic manner.



There's lots more, but these are the first four I can think of.