Egon Neuberger: in memoriam.
Ben-Ner, Avner ; James, Estelle
Egon Neuberger lived a very rich life, cut short at the age of 82
by leukaemia. He was a key participant in the comparative economic
systems field from the 1950s until the 1990s, a contributor to important
ideas in additional fields, a prized teacher, an active citizen of the
economics profession and his university, the University of New York at
Stony Brook, an accomplished academic administrator, a fantastic
colleague, a precious friend, a film and theater enthusiast, and so much
more.
Neuberger's interests were wide ranging. Many of his
publications were in the area of economic systems on traditional topics:
international trade within the Soviet bloc and between that bloc and the
West, international migration, and so on. Some of his most important
contributions dealt with issues of historical importance. In the 1960s,
on the basis of a theoretical analysis of empirical facts known about
the Soviet Union, he predicted the instability and eventual demise of
the system. He also developed the first analysis of the legacies of
central planning in a paper in 1968, about a quarter of a century before
this became a widespread concern to academics and more so to
practitioners. He also wrote extensively about international migration
and foreign trade within and across the political blocks, some with
coauthors Laura Tyson and Alan Brown, among others.
Neuberger's comprehensive approach to economic systems was
outlined in several publications, including a textbook with William
Duffy in the 1970s outlining the decision-making, information and
motivation approach and applying it to an examination of several
countries. Along with John Michael Montias and Avner Ben-Net, he
expanded his analysis of economic systems in a book published shortly
after the disintegration of the Soviet Union, at a time when just about
everybody had lost interest in the subject.
Neuberger was interested in the interaction between self-interest
and other motives, and was involved in early research on the 'gift
economy,' a theme that was among the precursors of contemporary
behavioural economics. He addressed the question of comparative
micro-organisational analysis in several papers, including one
coauthored with Ben-Ner and Montias in the Journal of Comparative
Economics in 1993, integrating self-interest and bounded rationality and
comparing for-profit firms with nonprofit, government, and cooperative
organisations. His work on comparative economic organisations started in
the 1970s. His work on the self-manage firm, with Estelle James,
analysed agency and collective decision-making problems in the dominant
form of organisation in what was then Yugoslavia. Insights provided by
this analysis led to further work with James on university departments,
likening them to workers' cooperatives and discussing how this
affects the allocation of university resources among multiple products,
such as undergraduate education, graduate education, and research, etc.
Egon Neuberger belongs to the generation of comparative economic
systems' giants (1) who spoke many languages, had lived in several
countries, had an understanding of several academic disciplines, and
took economic theory as their point of departure. He was interested in
exploring general themes and resisted carrying out individual country
studies, including of the country in which he was born. (2)
Beyond his research, Neuberger was a university citizen par
excellence--the kind of colleague we all wish we had but rarely do. He
taught large undergraduate classes that were both substantive and
popular, and he continued this even after retiring from full time work
at the university. He was always a respected voice of reason in the
department and university. His basic fairness led to an unusual degree
of trust when he served as Dean of the Social and Behavioral Sciences.
He was generous in the time he spent mentoring graduate students and
junior faculty, including the two of us. Like the best of economists, he
had his feet and his mind in the interplay between the real world and
the theoretical world. And his heart, as Michael Montias was fond of
saying, was in the right place.
(1) As his wife Florence is fond of recalling, Egon, not a large
man physically, in his 70s fought off a Manhattan mugger intent on
snatching Florence's purse.
(2) Neuberger wrote a working paper in the early 1970s evaluating
the changes in the economic system of Yugoslavia in relation to various
political struggles grounded in regional and other differences. That
paper drew one of us (Ben-Ner) to study with him, initially to pursue
the interplay between economics aim politics in Yugoslavia.
Neuberger's only published papers on Yugoslavia were a theoretical
analysis of worker-managed firms in 1973, with Estelle James, and a more
comprehensive work with Ben-Net analysing the pressures for change in
the Yugoslav economic system that was published in the Journal of
Comparative Economics in December of 1990, only months before the formal
disintegration of the country.
AVNER BEN-NER (1) & ESTELLE JAMES (2,3)
(1) University of Minnesota, Minneapolis, MN, USA
(2) Stony Brook University (emeritus)
(3) World Bank (formerly)
doi:10.1057/ces.2008.19