Department of Economics
College of Arts & Sciences

Meet the Faculty

Gary Langer, Ph.D. - Professor of Economics

Email: glanger@roosevelt.edu

About Gary Langer and his publications

When I was a new graduate student in the early 1970s, I spent much of my spare time, between maximizing utility functions and finding steady-state growth paths, hunting down Joan Robinson articles in the library. Even today, there's no one whose instincts and judgements have more in common with mine, rightly and wrongly, than Joan Robinson's.

In 1982, I had the privilege of meeting her and talking economics over the course of about three days. The prospect of meeting your hero can be intimidating--what if she's not the way you think she'll be? But she was more than the person I thought she'd be and had a warm smile that I'd never even imagined.

This review of her last published book of essays, What Are the Questions, is my homage to her. "Review of Joan Robinson's What are the Questions? And Other Essays" (Economic Forum, 1983)

Ever since I first understood it, I've always believed that the one-commodity model that Piero Sraffa argued was at the center of David Ricardo's Essay on Profits, the so-called 'corn model', lays bare the inner logic and fundamental nature of capitalism in a keenly insightful manner. I believe that it shows that the essential features of capitalism are independent of the existence of a multiplicity of commodities and independent of the exchange of commodities, which is to say, markets. The only exchange that needs to be accounted for, the only market that needs explanation, is the exchange between the laborer and the capitalist. It is that exchange and that relationship that gives raison d'être and coherence to the system as a whole. This idea runs through all these three papers, and, especially, the last one, "Corn: A Classical Landscape". "Further Evidence for Sraffa's Interpretation of Ricardo" (Cambridge Journal of Economics, 1982) "A Formalization of Ricardo's Corn Model Along Sraffian Lines" (unpublished) "Corn: A Classical Landscape" (Economic Notes, 1988)

A topic that very nearly obsessed me during the first 10 years that I studied economics was the so-called Marxian Transformation Problem. I began, naively, as an enthusiastic supporter of the Marxist view that there is a clear and systematic relationship between the quantity of labor embodied in commodities and their exchangeable values. This is endlessly reiterated in Volume I, Chapter I, of Das Kapital. Marx certainly thought that an elegant and logical theory of capitalism could be built upon the bedrock of one form or another of the labor theory of value à la Ricardo, if only we could "pluck" him "out of his bourgeois skin". Only the most insideous bourgeois apologist could fail to see this and claim it to be wrong. In the first course in the History of Economic Thought that I took as an undergraduate, I remember my professor beginning his lecture one day with the words "Marx was a great economist, but he was wrong." I was determined to show that it was in fact he that was wrong. But, try as I might, I could never demonstrate, to my own satisfaction, the truth of Marx's claim. While I remained sympathetic to many Marxist analyses, I held to progressively weaker and weaker forms of the labor theory of value until I finally gave it up entirely. The relationship between labor and value is weak and unsystematic, I concluded. This paper, which marked the end of my obsession with the transformation problem, exposes the logical flaw in one of the most sophisticated renderings of the labor theory of value, one that is present not just in the work of Marx, but also in that of Ricardo and John Stuart Mill. Some of the ideas that many Marxists believe are inextricably bound up in complex theoretical structures are often, I think, quite simple. I like, for example, qua essential Marx, the following poem, signed "One of the Know-Nothings", that appeared in The Poor Man's Guardian, in London, in 1831: Wages should form the price of goods; Yes, wages should be all, Then we who work to make the goods, Should justly have them all; But if their price be made of rent, Tithes, taxes, profits all, Then we who work to make the goods, Shall have—just none at all.

"Organic Compositions of Capital and the Labor Theory of Value" (Contributions to Political Economy, 1987)

One of my main interests has always been to understand the means through which ideology creeps into, and corrupts, economics. I've noticed, for example, that "incentives" has crept up textbook lists of principles of economics in the last 20 years. It used to be taken for granted that people respond to incentives, but now old-fashioned common sense is elevated to "principle" status. Why? My inclination is to consider this a consequence of the political fact that "incentives" arguments have become the key intellectual and rhetorical support for lowering marginal tax rates of high income earners and for rationalizing the unequal distribution of income. This inclination aside, this paper examines basic textbook welfare economics and observes that "worker preferences" do not matter. The paper shows that this oversight is not benign. That is, all the usual "marginal conditions" describing Pareto optima fail to hold when worker preferences do matter. "Marginalism," in this sense, therefore, has an ideological connection. The assumptions encapsulated in the usual utility functions of economic agents focus upon consumption and ignore worker preferences among working conditions and techniques of production.

This observation is another form of Bukharin's claim that marginalist/neoclassical economics is The Economic Theory of the Leisure Class because it elevates the experiences and aspirations of a class that does no work—his leisure class—to universal human status, while ignoring the experiences and aspirations of the working class. Bukharin himself, however, is no exemplar of ideological unbiasedness, and this paper is by no means meant as an homage to Bukharin.

Our intellectual goal should be to transcend ideological bias everywhere it deceives us. "A Bukharian Critique of Welfare Economics" (unpublished)

This is the original version of a paper that was published as "Kalecki and the Keynesians." I intended it as a parody of polemical contentiousness existing between schools of thought in macroeconomics, but I don't think I pulled it off very well. The paper reads to me today as shrill and simplistic. I make one very important point very well, however, namely, that a simple Kaleckian model provides answers to three venerable questions in the history of economic thought, namely, the short-run effects of monopoly, technical change, aand wage-cutting on employment and national income. Kalecki's treatment of the mark-up, moreover, is extremely helpful in understanding and applying today's NAIRU models. "Bastard Kalecki: A Pedagogical Polemic" (original version of "Kalecki and the Keynesians," Economic Forum, 1984)

I have always wanted to be able to explain as wide a swath of reality with as small a set of principles as possible. I suppose this makes me a modernist wannabe, but I am unable to shake it off and join the post-modern multitudes of the 21st century. This piece, intended entirely as a web publication (how 21st century can you get?), sketches my view of some of today's key issues in macroeconomics. It takes the NAIRU family of theories, broadly considered, seriously, and suggests a way out.

For some reason, no one takes much notice of the fact that the NAIRU theories expose a flaw in the free-market system. The flaw is that monetary and fiscal policy cannot establish full employment ("first best employment"). All they can do is establish the NAIRU ("second best"). The NAIRU is the rate of unemployment at which the relative bargaining strengths of employees and employers are just such that the rate of increase in money wage rates is consistent with constancy of the rate of inflation. We can have price stability but not full employment. Careful thinkers at the FED, apparently not wanting to advertise falsely, have redacted the term "full employment" from some of their publications and replaced it with the more honest "maximum sustainable employment." But they do not explore what our moral reaction to this should be.

What are we, economists with moral sentiments like those suggested, perhaps, by our intellectual ancestor, Adam Smith, to do? When we trusted laissez-faire we could put our hopes on market adjustment restoring full employment. When we were flush with enthusiasm for Keynes, our hopes could be borne by fiscal and monetary policy. But now when the best we can hope for is second best, how shall we feel, what should we think, what shall we do? I believe that these are the questions. "A Grand Theory of Almost Everything (Macro)" (web)

College of Arts and Sciences | Economics