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