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K. Vela Velupillai
Dipartimento di Economia
Universita di Trento
Via Inama 5
I-381 00 Trento, Italy
kvelupillai@gmail.com
2 May 2011
-Robert Wayne Clower
The only explicit statement the great logician Kurt Gödel is ever known to have made about economics was characteristically prescient. Anticipating, by many months, the publication of Keynes’ General Theory, Gödel, in commenting on a celebrated paper by Abraham Wald which, itself, was the fountainhead of modern mathematical general equilibrium economics, pointed out a central tenet of Keynesian macroeconomics: the need to include income as an argument in individual demand functions. The famous Clowerian dual decision hypothesis, hatched in Monrovia, the capital of Liberia, and produced at the Abbey in Royaumont, France at the International Economic Association conference of 1962, was devised with the express intention of ‘getting income into demand functions’ and, thus, reorient the research agenda of macroeconomic theory away from the fallacies and ad hockeries of theneoclassical synthesis toward a framework where money, dynamics and disequilibria played essential roles with solid microeconomic foundations. It was the beginning of a lifelong search for consistency between macro and micro economic theories which, Clower thought, could be found only if the economic theorist succeeded in constructing successful thought experiments (Gedankenexperiment) to tame disequilibrium economic processes in monetary economies. This search for consistency was, surely, the only bond that linked the unlikely personalities of Gödel and Clower.
Bob Clower, almost single-handedly, initiated simultaneous moves away from the complacency and the twin orthodoxies of the neoclassical synthesis that had come to dominate macroeconomic thinking on the one hand and, on the other, a general equilibrium theory that had come to be viewed as providing a rigorous foundation for microeconomic theory. Clower’s celebrated two thought experiments – the dual decision hypothesis and the dichotomised budget constraint - were constructed, respectively, to expose the lack of any Keynesian content in the neoclassical synthesis and to highlight the role of money in exchange processes and, hence, the vacuity of a general equilibrium theory that claimed to model exchange economies faithfully.
In one of those compelling coincidences of life and its mysteries, Robert Wayne Clower was born in Pullman, in the state of Washington, on 13 Februay, 1926, even as the death was being announced of another great economic theorist, Francis Ysidiro Edgeworth, on that very day. Wicksell, too, died that same year, a few months later.
His father, Fay Walter, was from Morrisonville in Illinois and was a Professor of Economics at Washington State University, in Pullman. His mother, Mary Valentine, from Chanute, Kansas, was ‘wise and lovable’ whose advice, ‘not to go looking for arguments’, the son ignored for most of his life. Bob Clower once told me that one of his distant cousins had traced the Clower’s back to about 1745 in Scotland. The first Clowers in the ‘New World’ were found in Charleston, South Carolina around 1750.
Clower graduated from Pullman High School in 1943 after a short stint as a radio repairman in Seattle. He claimed to have won no prizes of distinction at school except to have narrowly avoided occupying last place in the academic honours list at school, 52nd out of 54! After army service for 31 months, from 1943 to 1946, in Wiesbaden, Germany – during which he also managed to get married to a Scottish Lady from Aberdeen – Clower returned to enter Washington State University as a Freshman in the summer session of 1946. Although Clower started his undergraduate studies with the intention of pursuing a career in law, he ended up by graduating, in 1948, with the highest honours and obtaining a BA in economics and, in the following year, also an MA in economics.
Part of these alleyways into economics was inspired by a perceptive Father – “who had met Maynard Keynes at a University of Chicago seminar in 1931 and thought him ‘fascinating’” – who gave the undisciplined son a copy of The Economic Consequences of the Peace soon after the return from Wiesbaden and just before entering University, in early 1946, just before Keynes’s untimely death in April of that year. The result was a lifelong passion and interest in Keynes in every sense imaginable and, more importantly, a reading of the General Theory even before starting formal University education in economics.
A Rhodes Scholarship took him to Oxford to do a Ph.D in economics under John Hicks. Clower initially proposed a thesis on ‘Theories of Capital Accumulation’ but changed it to add the phrase ‘With special reference to Their Ability to Explain the Experience of the United States and Great Britain Since 1869’, on the advice of Hicks who informed him that to obtain an Oxford doctorate in economics one would have to ‘exhibit skill at handling facts along with theory’. The completed thesis, on submission in May of 1952, was judged – in Clower’s own brutally honest opinion, ‘rightly’ – to be ‘not in a form fit for publication’ and was failed. He was offered the consolation prize of a B.Litt and a quarter century later, in 1978, Oxford bestowed on him a D.Litt and his Oxford odyssey was crowned, in December of the same year, when he was elected to an Honorary Fellowship at his alma mater, of sorts, Brasenose College.
For a decade and a half he shepherded, as Managing Editor, two of the most influential Journals in the world of academic economics. From 1973 to 1980 he edited the Western Economic Journal, which subsequently became Economic Inquiry; and the American Economic Review, the premier Journal of the profession, from 1981 to 1985. When I asked him, not long after he resigned from the latter, prestigious position, why he did not continue in the post, at least so that he could guide the direction of research, even in some small way, in wise and interesting directions, his answer was pungent and direct: ‘the submissions were pure paper, nothing but paper and dull, dull, dull’! I could not argue, and did not do so.
Robert Clower unleashed a ferocious and sustained criticism of what he felt was the mechanical framework and duplicity of the neoclassical synthesis and its emasculated portrait of Keynesian economics as a special case of the classical system. In his unfortunately unpublished ‘Perugia Lectures’ of the early 70s he described his conversation with Paul Samuelson soon after the publication of Axel Leijonhufvud’s influential book on Keynesian Economics and the Economics of Keynes. In that conversation Samuelson ‘confesses’ that the phrase neoclassical synthesis, first used in the third edition of his famous textbook, was coined simply to placate the ‘McCarthyites’ who were ‘on his back’ for being a Keynesian. Clower’s incredulity, described vividly in those fine ‘Perugia Lectures’, that a whole generation ofmacroeconomic education had been based on an empty shell, and his anger at the callousness of the ‘eastern establishment’, was evident even in the written word.
Clower’s contribution to economic theory and methodology span vast, deep, wonderful and colourful canvasses. Monetary macroeconomics was his forte. But this was underpinned by a conviction, buttressed by solid theoretical work, and a recognition based on acute observation of real world phenomena, that economies where money matters are those in which exchange and production processes can only be observed in disequilibrium states. Hence, he felt, it was imperative that an honest macroeconomic theorist should develop theories and construct thought experiments to elucidate such disequilibrium dynamics. With these convictions and understanding to guide him, he constructed those famous thought experiments of the dual decision hypothesis and the dichotomised budget constraint to suggest the kind of theories, models and concepts that were imperative for an understanding of monetary economies in situ. The concepts he introduced have become a part of the folklore of macroeconomics and the novice in his graduate studies meets them as ‘Clower Constraints’ or ‘Finace Constraints’, although it is only the form, not the economic content, that bears any relation to the creator’s concepts, as he has, himself, tirelessly repeated.
There was a particular novelty in the way he derived what came to be called the ‘Clower constraint’ which, in simplistic terms one can describe by saying that one cannot spend without having some money to do the spending with. The novelty was his explicitly stated awareness that going, by aggregating, from individuals to the macroeconomy, the only constraining microeconomic structural properties are Walras’s Law and continuity of the demand functions. These structural constraints, and their role in linking the individual and the collective, came to be formalized by the mathematical economists only some years later and now, generally, referred to as the Sonnenschein-Debreu-Mantel theorem on excess demand functions. One could, with perfect justice, add Clower’s name to the above trio, for no other economist has used it in the imaginative way he did, to draw out its deep implications in one particular and important domain.
The acuteness and sensitivity with which he has been an observer of the economic scene, and his scholarship of the classics of theory, convinced him, also, of the ubiquity of scale effects in economic processes. There are too many nonconvexities in production processes and too many indivisibilities in exchange processes, he claimed, over and over again. Monetary units, for example, do not come in infinitely divisible form. They come in units of whole dollars, euros or whatever and, even in England, in decimal subunits of the primary denomination.
He did not, like the uncritical curmudgeons of the profession, leave it at that; he went on, in several path-breaking papers, to try to construct with novel mathematical tools, rigorous models in which these non-convexities and indivisibilities could be explored theoretically. In one of these, jointly written with his younger collaborator and sometime colleague, Peter Howitt, both novel and difficult aspects of number theory and dynamical system theory were invoked, with the laconic caveat that ‘the proofs [of propositions about the transactions demand for money] necessarily involve the use of number theory – a branch of mathematics unfamiliar to most economists.’ This exercise was to illustrate another of his firmly held beliefs: that even simple issues in economics, in this case the familiar and almost banal case of the transactions demand for money balances, require careful analytical considerations and sophisticated mathematical tools to be faithful to real phenomena.
His co-author for the early book on an Introduction to Mathematical Economics, Bushaw – a noted expert on dynamical systems theory - was also his trusted lieutenant in his explorations into the difficult field of disequilibrium economic dynamics. It is, therefore, not surprising that his penetrating criticism of standard economic dynamics of varieties of Walrasian tatonnement were technically well informed. This writer has benefited in numerous ways from Clower’s vast knowledge and almost perfect recall of mathematical classics. When I was working on the literature on topological fix point theorems and their applications in dynamical systems theory, it was to Clower I first turned for some guidance and he, unerringly, told me to begin with the papers by the elder Birkhoff on Poincaré’s ‘last conjecture’.
These considerations of ‘lumpiness’, he felt, rendered the welfare propositions of economic theory, particularly the two so-called fundamental theorems of welfare economics, which underpin many of the efficiency claims of theoretically derived policy proposals, inapplicable and even dangerous, if taught and retained in textbooks. He devoted the opportunities for reflection granted by Presidential addresses to the Western and Southern Economic Associations and to the History of Economics Society to propagate these themes in wise and measured ways. In these superbly crafted lectures he also called for a return to the inductive traditions of Adam Smith, William Whewell and, of course, Maynard Keynes.
Clower travelled widely – early in his career to Lahore as a Visiting Professor at the University of the Punjab in 1954-56; to direct the Economic Survey of Liberia in 1961-2; as a Visiting Professor at Makerere College in Uganda, in the Summer of 1965. These visits to South Asia and West and East Africa, he once said, gave him ‘a feel for theoretical treatment of fact and factual scrutiny of theory’.
Then there were invitations and visits to all the usual prestigious places in the western academic world as a Visiting Professor: Cambridge, Oxford, Stockholm, Vienna, Siena, Trento, Western Ontario etc. He even almost decided to move to the UK on a permanent basis in the late 60s when, between his main permanent, long-term, sojourns at Northwestern University (1958-64, Chairman for the whole period) and UCLA (1971-86), he spent a couple of years as the Dean of the School of Social Studies and Professor of Economics at the University of Essex.
Many and varied academic honours came his way. He was elected a Fellow of the Econometric Society in 1978 and was the recipient of Fullbright, Guggenheim and Erskine Fellowships. He co-authored four textbooks, edited a much cited and useful Penguin collection on Monetary Theory, produced two jointly written monographs on Liberia and Puerto Rico and published two volumes of collected essays.
In 1996, a handsome Conference to celebrate his 70th birthday was organised at the University of Trento and this resulted in a fine Festschrift with contributions from many of his close academic friends and admirers. I took the opportunity to give him, as his 70th birthday present, just before I gave my own talk at that memorable conference, what I thought was the perfect gift to a man who could not suffer fools, pretensions or pomposity: an original edition of Carlo Cipolla’s pungent booklet, The Four Basic Laws of Human Stupidity (which was a personal gift from the author to me when Cipolla and I had been colleagues in Florence, more than two decades ago).
Bob Clower was an exceptionally generous man, particularly to Junior Colleagues and graduate students. I am a living example of this generosity, as his Falstaffian – ‘brevity is the soul of wit - contribution to my Festschrift (2010) would testify. I take this opportunity to mention this contribution only because I believe this was his last, written, professional paper.
Contrariwise, he could seem to be arrogant towards Senior Colleagues and anyone who exhibited the slightest trace of pretence or humbug. I have seen him ‘carve eminent economists as dishes fit for the gods’, at exclusive and specialized conferences, where sloppy analysis and incorrect historical knowledge were exposed with razor sharp wit. His battles with Patinkin at such events were legendary and even entertaining to the cognoscenti.
The final academic move was to the University of South Carolina as the first Hugh C. Lane Professor of Economic Theory, in 1986. The move was motivated more by personal, family, considerations than anything else. By then the two daughters from his second marriage to Georgene were on the verge of becoming teenagers and Los Angeles, seething in all sorts of ways, did not seem to be an attractive place for family life. So this combative, extroverted, peripatetic academic chose the peace and tranquillity of Columbia, South Carolina, and literally at the supreme height of his academic career, withdrew to a ‘quiet life’.
A debilitating stroke of a little over a decade ago seriously hampered Bob Clower physically, although it did not diminish in any way his mental alertness and agility till almost the very end. In his last years he was nursed with loving care by his wife, Georgene, with immaculate attention, at their beautiful Columbia home. It was only in the last few months that they moved to a small apartment, in the same attractive neighbourhood.
Clower had five children – four daughters and one son - from his first marriage to Frances Hepburn which was dissolved in 1975, and two daughters, Anasthasia, born in 1978, and Kathryn, born in 1980, from his second marriage to Georgene Thousendfriend. He was always very proud, also, of his five grandchildren. All of them survive him.
原文地址：http://www.econ.ucla.edu/clower/
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