Underappreciated economists, a new installment

Brian Loasby.  He has been a Professor of Economics at the University of Stirling, now emeritus.

I read Loasby’s Choice, Complexity, and Ignorance (alas, not to be found in Loasby’s Amazon list) at a very young age.  Here was an "Austrian" theory of choice and the firm that was both dynamic and had empirical content.  Who else started with Marshall and Joan Robinson but integrated Lachmann, Cyert and March, and the best of institutionalist thought, all without falling in dogma?  Loasby also embodied the kaleidic best of G.L.S. Shackle without flying off the rails into analytic nihilism.  If you want a phenomenological description of how firms deal with radical uncertainties about the future, this is the place to go.

Here is an interview with Brian Loasby.  Here is one nice bit, intended as a general point but also in defense of Marshallian reasoning:

I have never been able to question very much at a time, I think.  I got a note somewhere of something that G.K. Chesterton once said, that a man must be orthodox on most things, or he will never have time able to practice his own particular heresy.

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