Abstract
Meghnad Desai has had a distinguished career as an economist, a political scientist and a politician: he is a Renaissance man. He has published numerous books and academic papers on a variety of topics, including Marxian economics, agricultural economics, development economics and macroeconomics. Besides his academic interests, he has been involved in movies and theatre. Meghnad has always been concerned with social issues. He was born in India and did his undergraduate education in Bombay, his doctorate at Pennsylvania, and began his academic career in the Agricultural Department at the University of California, Berkeley, before moving to LSE. After retiring from LSE, in 2015 he collaborated with some of his former students to establish an academic institution in India, the Meghnad Desai Academy of Economics (MDAE).
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Notes
- 1.
It is surprising that Meghnad declares that he never faced racial discrimination in the UK. As I am also an Indian who lived in London, Durham and Colchester, I faced discrimination in housing and on the streets in Britain.
- 2.
Meghnad had been areligious for some time as a young man, but subsequently became an atheist.
- 3.
Had he stayed in the USA, he would have obtained a Green Card but then been eligible for the draft—he decided that he would rather go to the UK!
- 4.
In the 1960s and 1970s, most British academics did not publish many papers. When Harry Johnson joined LSE (spending six months of each year at LSE and six months at Chicago), he began the ‘Americanisation’ of LSE academics with the ‘publish or perish’ theme. Meghnad, compared to his colleagues, was a prodigious publisher.
- 5.
However, he did get tenure at the end of his three years’ probation.
- 6.
David Hendry, in private correspondence (5 September 2016), says that although Meghnad used the Hendry PC-GIVE econometrics computer program, the diagnostics always rejected the empirical specifications of most researchers and he [Meghnad] called it a ‘model destruction program’!
- 7.
As a political commentator, Meghnad also wrote regularly for the British radical weekly, Tribune.
- 8.
- 9.
For a critical analysis of Marx’s writings, see Junankar (1982).
- 10.
The Woolf Inquiry in 2011 reported: ‘I [Woolf] have set out a number of failings in this Report, but would like to make clear that I am satisfied that the evidence does not show that any of the academics or staff at the LSE acted other than in what they perceived to be the best interests of the School’ (Woolf Inquiry 2011: 129).
- 11.
This is obviously a play on words on Jawaharlal Nehru’s classic The Discovery of India.
- 12.
This is mentioned in Meghnad’s draft autobiography.
- 13.
This is based on Meghnad’s draft autobiography.
- 14.
I am grateful to Jim Thomas for providing me with this information.
- 15.
See his recent book, Desai (2015).
References
Main Works by Meghnad Desai
Anderton, R. and M. Desai (1988). ‘Modelling Manufacturing Imports’. National Institute Economic Review, 123(1): 80–86.
Desai, M. (1966). ‘An Econometric Model of the World Tin Economy, 1948–1961’. Econometrica, 34(1): 105–134.
Desai, M. (1970). ‘Vortex in India’. New Left Review, I/61 (May–June): 43–60.
Desai, M. (1973). ‘Growth Cycles and Inflation in a Model of the Class Struggle’. Journal of Economic Theory, 6(6): 527–545.
Desai, M. (1974). Marxian Economic Theory. London: Gray-Mills.
Desai, M. (1975). ‘The Phillips Curve: A Revisionist Interpretation’. Economica, New Series, 42(165): 1–19.
Desai, M. (1976a). Applied Econometrics. Oxford: Philip Allan.
Desai, M. (1976). ‘The Consolation of Slavery’. Economic History Review, New Series, 29(3): 491–503.
Desai, M. (1981). Testing Monetarism. London: Pinter.
Desai, M. (1984). ‘A General Theory of Poverty? A Review Article’. Indian Economic Review, New Series, 19(2): 157–169.
Desai, M. (1986). ‘Men and Things’. Economica, New Series, 53(209): 1–10.
Desai, M. (1988). ‘The Transformation Problem’. Journal of Economic Surveys, 2(4): 295–333.
Desai, M. (1989). ‘The Scourge of the Monetarists: Kaldor on Monetarism and on Money’. Cambridge Journal of Economics, 13(1): 171–182.
Desai, M. (1989). Lenin’s Economic Writings. Atlantic Highlands, NJ: Humanities Press International.
Desai, M. (1991). ‘The Agrarian Crisis in Medieval England: A Malthusian Tragedy or a Failure of Entitlements?’. Bulletin of Economic Research, 43(3): 223–258.
Desai, M. (1991). ‘Human Development: Concepts and Measurement’. European Economic Review, 35(2–3): 350–357.
Desai, M. (1992). ‘Is There Life After Mahalanobis? The Political Economy of India’s New Economic Policy’. Indian Economic Review, New Series, 27(Special Number): 155–164.
Desai, M. (1995). ‘An Endogenous Growth Cycle with Vintage Capital’. Economics of Planning, 28(2–3): 87–91.
Desai, M. (1995). Macroeconomics and Monetary Theory: The Selected Essays of Meghnad Desai. Volume 1. Aldershot: Edward Elgar.
Desai, M. (1995). Poverty, Famine and Economic Development: The Selected Essays of Meghnad Desai. Volume 2. Aldershot: Edward Elgar.
Desai, M. (1998). ‘Development Perspectives: Was There an Alternative to Mahalanobis?’. Chapter 2 in I.M.D. Little and I.J. Ahluwalia (eds) India’s Economic Reforms and Development: Essays for Manmohan Singh. New Delhi: Oxford University Press: 40–48.
Desai, M. (2000). ‘Review of Unintended Consequences: The Impact of Factor Endowments, Culture, and Politics on Long-Run Economic Performance, by D. Lal’. Journal of Economic Literature, 38(2): 414–415.
Desai, M. (2001). ‘Amartya Sen’s Contribution to Development Economics’. Oxford Development Studies, 29(3): 213–223.
Desai, M. (2002). Marx’s Revenge: The Resurgence of Capitalism and the Death of Statist Socialism. London: Verso.
Desai, M. (2003). ‘Review of Economic Policy Reforms and the Indian Economy, by A.O. Krueger’. Journal of Economic Literature, 41(2): 614–616.
Desai, M. (2009). The Rediscovery of India. New Delhi: Penguin.
Desai, M. (2015). Hubris: Why Economists Failed to Predict the Crisis and How to Avoid the Next One. New Haven and London: Yale University Press.
Desai, M. (unpublished). Autobiography. Draft.
Desai, M. and D. Blake (1982). ‘Monetarism and the US Economy: A Re-evaluation of Stein’s Model, 1960–1973’. Journal of Monetary Economics, 10(1): 111–125.
Desai, M. and S.G. Hall (2003). ‘S.G.B. Henry: A Memoir and a Festschrift Essay’. Economic Modelling, 20(2): 227–236.
Desai, M., D.F. Hendry and G.E. Mizon (1997). ‘John Denis Sargan’. Economic Journal, 107(443): 1121–1125.
Desai, M. and S.G.B. Henry (1970). ‘Fiscal Policy Simulation for the UK Economy’. Chapter 14 in K. Hilton and D.F. Heathfield (eds) The Econometric Study of the United Kingdom. London: Macmillan: 351–374.
Desai, M., S.G.B. Henry, A. Mosley and M. Pemberton (2006). ‘A Clarification of the Goodwin Model of the Growth Cycle’. Journal of Economic Dynamics and Control, 30(12): 2661–2670.
Desai, M. and D. Mazumdar (1970). ‘A Test of the Hypothesis of Disguised Unemployment’. Economica, New Series, 37(145): 39–53.
Desai, M., S.H. Rudolph and A. Rudra (1984). Agrarian Power and Agricultural Productivity in South Asia. Los Angeles and London: University of California Press.
Desai, M. and A. Shah (1988). ‘An Econometric Approach to the Measurement of Poverty’. Oxford Economic Papers, New Series, 40(3): 505–522.
Desai, M. and G. Weber (1988). ‘A Keynesian Macro-econometric Model of the UK: 1955–1984’. Journal of Applied Econometrics, 3(1): 1–33.
Henry, S.G.B. and M. Desai (1975). ‘Fiscal Policy Simulations and Stabilization Policy’. Review of Economic Studies, 42(3): 347–359.
Kumar, D. and M. Desai (eds) (1983). The Cambridge Economic History of India: Volume 2: c. 1757-c. 1970. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Shah, A. and M. Desai (1981). ‘Growth Cycles with Induced Technical Change’. Economic Journal, 91(364): 1006–1010.
Other Works Referred To
Gilbert, C.L. (1976). ‘The Original Phillips Curve Estimates’. Economica, New Series, 43(169): 51–57.
Junankar, P.N. (Raja) (1982). Marx’s Economics. Oxford: Philip Allan.
Junankar, P.N. (Raja) (2012). ‘Review of The Global Minotaur: America, the True Origins of the Financial Crisis and the Future of the World Economy, by Y. Varoufakis’. Economic and Labour Relations Review, 23(2): 135–141.
LSE (2010). ‘Celebrating the Work and Legacy of Professor Lord Meghnad Desai’. Available at: www.lse.ac.uk/website-archive/newsAndMedia/videoAndAudio/channels/publicLecturesAndEvents/player.aspx?id=775.
MDAE (2015). ‘Post Graduate Program in Economics and Finance’. Available at: http://www.meghnaddesaiacademy.org/admissions-2015.
Sargan, J.D. (1964). ‘Wages and Prices in the United Kingdom: A Study in Econometric Methodology’. In P.E. Hart, G. Mills and J.K. Whitaker (eds) Econometric Analysis for National Economic Planning. Volume 16. Colston Papers. London: Butterworths: 25–54, with discussion.
Sargan, J.D. (1988). Lectures on Advanced Econometric Theory. Edited and with an introduction by Meghnad Desai. Oxford: Basil Blackwell.
Townsend, P. (1962). ‘The Meaning of Poverty’. British Journal of Sociology, 13(3): 210–227.
Varoufakis, Y. (2005). ‘A Hard Spectre to Silence: Meghnad Desai’s Marx’s Revenge’. Science & Society, 69(4): 617–625.
Woolf Inquiry (2011). ‘An Inquiry into the LSE’s Links with Libya and Lessons to be Learned’. Available at: http://www.lse.ac.uk/website-archive/newsAndMedia/woolf/pdf/woolfReport.pdf.
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(Raja) Junankar, P.N. (2019). Meghnad Desai (1940–). In: Cord, R.A. (eds) The Palgrave Companion to LSE Economics. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-58274-4_32
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