The Death Of Carl Chiarella

Carl Chiarella died this morning after a long illness, which had forced him to fully retire last summer from his position at the University of Technology in Sydney, Australia.  Long one of  the leading figures in the  Bielefeld School branch of Post Keynesian economics, he was coauthor of numerous books with people like Peter Flaschel, Willi Semmler, Reiner Franke, and numerous others.  The Bielefeld School takes seriously nonlinear dynamics as well as integrating ideas from Marx, Keynes, and Schumpeter, with Carl being the leading nonlinear dynamicist in this group, having written several books and important papers in that area by himself.

He also served as a coeditor of the Journal of Economic Dynamics and Control for several years as well as being an associate editor of the Journal of Economic Behavior and Organization when I was its editor.  In later years he wrote more on finance, including about speculative bubble dynamics in agent-based models.  For many years he organized and oversaw annual conferences on quantitative finance at the UTS.  He was a good guy who helped many out on many things and had a great dry wit.

The first time I met him was in 1995 when I spent a month visiting at the University of Newcastle in Australia as a guest of Bill Mitchell,which was when I also first met Steve Keen, who used to show up at some of Carl's finance conferences.  I gave a talk at UTS on the invitation of Carl, who had read my 1991 book, From Catastrophe to Chaos: A General Theory of Economic Discontinuities.  In its first two printings, the copyright page mistook me for my late father and had my birth date as 1907 (who had died in 1989, but somehow the Library of Congress had not gotten that point; this was my first book but my old man had published seven in his life and has my name, or maybe it is that I have his, except for the "Jr." at the end).  Anyway, just before Carl introduced me at the talk in his department, he said to me that he had expected me to be much older, and this was due to his having seen this erroneous birth date, which he thought was for real.  His PhD was in applied math.

Anyway, I and many others will miss him.  RIP, Carl.

Barkley Rosser.