Peter Albin Academic Memorial, May 20 4 PM

Tomorrow (May 20) there will be a memorial at 4 PM at the John Jay College of Criminal Justice in New York at 899 Tenth Avenue (west side of Tenth Avenue between 58th and 59th Streets), Room 630. He was a longtime member of the economics department there who died on Feb. 20, although he had been seriously incapacitated since a stroke in 1991. Duncan Foley and James Galbraith will be among the speakers, and there will be an open mike at 5 PM for people to speak on "Peter as we knew him."

Duncan Foley put together a set of his papers that were published in 1998 by Princeton University Press as _Barriers and Bounds to Rationality: Essays on Economic Complexity and Dynamics in Interactive Systems_. Below the fold I put a summary of some remarks about Peter that I have asked Duncan to make on my behalf as I shall not be present.



This is a shortened version of my remarks to be presented.

I note that I always found him to be a warm and genuine person of great principle, thoughtfulness, and kindness.

I then note three innovative contributions to economics he made.

1) His 1975 paper in Kyklos, "Reswitching: An Empirical Observation, A Theoretical Note, and an Environmental Conjecture," in which he showed he was the first to propose an empirical example of capital theoretic paradoxes and how they could relate to environmental issues, an application that may be made to the global warming debate.

2) His 1982 paper in Mathematical Social Sciences, "The Metalogic of Economic Predictions, Calculations, and Propositions," which was the first to study the implications for economic analysis and its limits of the Goedel Incompleteness and Inconsistency theorems. This was a foundational paper for the analysis of computational complexity in the economy.

3) His 1983 paper with Farrokh Hormozi in Mathematical Social Sciences, "Theoretical Reconciliation of Equilibrium and Structural Approaches," that was one of the first to apply cellular automata to studying economics, focusing on the coevolution of technology and institituions with catastrophe theory playing a role at critical points of discontinuos change in the evolution.

I shall also note here that I hosted a conference on May 17 on my campus on "Transdisciplinary Perspectives on Economic Complexity," which dealt with many of these themes, and which Duncan Foley participated in.