Overrated or underrated?
Ramagopal asks: Peter Bauer, Mises, Joan Robinson
1. Peter Bauer is underrated. He was a brilliant development economist who wrote seminal early and detailed books on the rubber sector and also networks of West African trade. He also recognized the importance of the informal sector early on. He then moved into a more polemic mode, writing books on market-oriented development strategies and very critical of foreign aid. I believe at the time he was largely correct about foreign aid, though I would recognize also that since then the quality and effectiveness of foreign aid has improved considerably, most of all because the receiving governments have on average improved in quality.
His family had a coat of arms, linked above at his name.
I once met Bauer at a seminar at NYU, way back when. He reminded me of a character from LOTR and he had a thick mane of white hair. I believe Bauer was also one of the first well-known economists to come out as gay.
2. Mises is underrated. His 1922 book Socialism is still the best and also historically most important critique of socialism, ever. His earlier articles about the impossibility of economic calculation under socialism are among the most important economics articles, ever. Those are already some pretty important contributions, and yet he is often talked of as a crank, perhaps because in part some of his followers were indeed cranks.
Liberalism I quite like. His book Bureaucracy is underdeveloped but still pretty interesting, and his hypotheses about the logic of cascading interventionism, if not entirely correct, still are an important contribution to public choice. They do explain a lot of the data. Human Action is big, cranky, and dogmatic, but for some people a useful tonic and alternative to the usual stuff. I can’t say I have ever really liked it, and in an odd way the whole emphasis on “Man acts” undoes at least one part of marginalism. The early Theory of Money and Credit was a pretty good early 20th century book on monetary theory.
Hayek somehow ended up as “the reasonable face of classical liberalism,” but in fact Mises was far more politically correct by current standards.
Obviously there is a sliver of people who very much overrate Mises. Here is a guy who hardly anyone rates properly. I’m still sticking with considerably underrated.
3. Joan Robinson’s Theory of Imperfect Competition was a very important book, and it laid the groundwork for a lot of later thinking about market structure, both geometrically and conceptually. But she didn’t understand actual economics, was a Maoist, and seemed to like the regime of North Korea. So I have to say overrated. Her Accumulation of Capital also was no great shakes, though hardly her greatest sin. Her growth theory was far too Marxian, and far too fond of “Golden Rule” constructs, which are mechanistic rather than insightful as models ought to be. Her writings in Economic Philosophy were not profound. So she has one truly major contribution, but I can’t get past the really bad stuff.