In 1932, Lerner received his bachelor's degree from the L.S.E. and published his first paper. The following year, he and a group of colleagues founded The Review of Economic Studies. Impatience with articles long in form and light in content was a prime motivation for the creation of a professional journal whose success has now extended over more than half a century. Also in the early to mid-1930s he played a leading role in organizing a London-Oxford-Cambridge Joint Seminar for younger economists in the three universities--a rare example of collaborative effort among them. By the time he completed his graduate studies in 1934, he was recognized as one of the future leaders of his profession with eight major articles to his credit, and the award of a prestigious Post Graduate Fellowship that permitted him to spend the year 1934-35 in Cambridge and in Manchester. But even more remarkable than his eight publications is a paper written in 1933 and unpublished for 17 years, stating and proving the international factor price equalization theorem. The result, re-discovered in 1948, became one of Nobel Laureate Paul A. Samuelson's most celebrated contributions to international equilibrium theory.
A few days ago, I mentioned Abba Lerner (who is being discovered because of political debates over MMT) in passing, and quietly linked to the quoted obituary. Not unlike his ideological opposite, Gordon Tullock, Lerner is relatively easy to read and the (relative) simplicity of his prose hides profundity. No less an authority than Paul Samuelson (1964) pointed out that 'Papers like those of Lerner's are so packed with results that few readers have ever gleaned all their fruits" (quoted by Landes).
When I started to write this post I intended to comment on Debreu's (to me surprising) appreciation of Lerner. But I got reminded of the great story around Lerner's unpublished seminar paper. The story is told with more detail by Landes, and I quote him first:
Samuelson's demonstration found its way to the desk of Lionel Robbins, who recalled that he had heard the same argument from a student in seminar some fifteen years earlier; and he still had a copy of that seminar paper, by Abba Lerner. At Robbins's urging, Lerner published the piece as originally written: "Factor Prices and International Trade," in Economica in 1952. The question remains, what had Lerner done with his copy of the paper during all those years?
The story, as told by Scitovsky, is that it had been lost; that Lerner had given the corrected typescript to a fellow student, who had volunteered to type it for submission to a periodical and then left it on a bus. It was never recovered, and Lerner was too busy working on other papers and perhaps too embarrassed by the circumstances to recover the text. At least that was the talk among Lerner's students in 1935, when Scitovsky was one of them.
Landes's account is worth reading not the least because he hints at the genteel British, academic antisemitism that prevented Lerner from obtaining a position. Be that as it may, Robbins was a central player in economics in the 1930s (and I have discussed him (recall) before not only because of his impact on Rawls), and LSE one of the key nodes of the profession. That he was no dummy is shown by the fact that he remembered Lerner's paper fifteen years later when he encountered Samuelson's paper. (I often don't even remember my own papers that long ago!) But it is notable that he seems to have missed its original significance (even if we can speculate that he may have been the one to nudge Lerner to submit the paper "to a periodical.")
Of course, Robbins fastidiousness in keeping seminar papers also saved the day. As I contemplate the story of the missing paper, I was struck by the fact that the fellow student, the culprit, never gets named. I think he (she?) would make a fine character in a short story, or (recall) histories of walk-in characters in the history of science.
As regular readers know I am fascinated by ways in which purported epistemic peers can miss the significance of a central contribution to the field (recall this episode on Bennett). Samuelson offers a generous footnote to Lerner's (then still unpublished piece) in his famous article, and he clearly suggests that he recognizes its importance (calling it "masterly, definitive treatment of the question, difficulties.") Samuelson was, at the time, redefining economics. Some other time I return to these papers (which connect nicely to my reading of Adam Smith).
I close on a minor key. Landes suggests that even Lerner "himself was not always aware of what he had done." This raises the interesting question to what degree one can fail to discern the significance of one's own contribution.While, of course, it's quite possible one fails to foresee every downstream implication of one's contribution, I am, nevertheless a bit suspicious of this idea; it lets us, lesser lights (who miss stuff all the time), off the hook a bit too easily. I prefer to think Lerner was simply busy tackling the next big problem.
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