A Nobel Laureate’s Career in 47 Boxes

I was William Vickrey’s colleague for three years in the early 1990s.        Columbia University has created a webpage listing everything that was in his files and now is stored in boxes at its library.  It appears to be an extraordinary set of files.  It would be great if Columbia could use its $ to digitize these records and post them to the web.

Author: Matthew E. Kahn

Professor of Economics at UCLA.

One thought on “A Nobel Laureate’s Career in 47 Boxes”

  1. Very cool, thanks for posting about this. Vickrey is the single most interesting economist I’ve ever read, and his ideas reverberate to this day (congestion pricing, auction theory, the evils of deficit hysteria). He was just an incredibly inventive man who was (as Don Draper was described by an ex-colleague), “”Always thinking on the edges of where you are…. he’s a genius.”. Its to the Nation’s benefit that Vickrey’s nature as a born doer of good led him down the path of teacher instead of criminal mastermind. I learned recently from Warren Mosler (who co-developed Modern Monetary Theory with Randy Wray and Bill Mitchell) that it was Vickrey who was responsible for introducing Mosler to the other two. Clearly that someone should create a TV whodunit series around him- mild-mannered Columbia professor who moonlights by assisting his NYPD detective niece solve crimes, something like that. :o)
    http://www.cooperativeindividualism.org/gaffney-mason_on-william-vickrey-1997.html

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