Sidney Weintraub — an Economist of the Real World

Abstract

In the view of both the general public and most professional economists, Sidney Weintraub is undoubtedly more closely associated with the concept of a tax-based incomes policy (or TIP) than with any other analytical or policy construction of economics. Yet, TIP is only one of many analytical innovations that Weintraub has developed in the more than a dozen books and a hundred articles he has authored since the 1940s.

Earlier, shorter versions of this paper were published in Contemporary Economics in Perspective, ed. by H. W. Spiegel and W. J. Samuels (Greenwich: JAI Press, 1984) and The Eastern Economic Journal, 9, 1983. This version was first published in Journal of Post Keynesian Economics, 7 (1985).

Professor Davidson reminisces:

I first met Sidney Weintraub when he was the Professor of the course on microeconomics that I took as a graduate student in economics at the University of Pennsylvania in 1955. I had previously been a Ph.D. candidate and Instructor in Physiological Chemistry at Pennsylvania before being drafted into the army and classified as a scientific and professional soldier to do medical research during the Korean War. This military scientific experience convinced me to change my occupational choice and I received an M.B. A. degree from City University of New York before going to Pennsylvania in 1955.

As a refugee from the empirical research of the biological sciences with its emphasis on experimental design and statistical inference, I found Weintraub’s realistic approach to economic analysis more relevant than the so-called ‘scientific’ empirical approach of some of my more famous professors at Pennsylvania who tried to distill the values of economic parameters from time series data. (My M.B.A. thesis had been on the use of Time Series Analysis in economics.) I was fortunate to study under Sidney during the period when he was developing his ideas for his Approach analysis; the lucidity of his arguments strongly affected my own choice of problems to be studied in future years.