David Ellerman
I was educated at MIT (BS in Philosophy) and had two MAs (in Philosophy of Science and in Economics) and a Phd (Mathematics) from Boston University. I have taught in various universities in several different areas, have founded some small consulting companies in the US and in Europe, and finally spent a decade in the World Bank including three years as advisor and speechwriter for Joseph Stiglitz when he was Chief Economist.
In 2003, I retired and returned to academia as a “Visiting Scholar” in the Philosophy Department at the University of California at Riverside. In addition to scholarly and not-so-scholarly articles in various journals, my last three books were:
- Helping People Help Themselves: From the World Bank to an Alternative Philosophy of Development Assistance, Foreword by Albert O. Hirschman (2005),
- Intellectual Trespassing as a Way of Life: Essays in Philosophy, Economics, and Mathematics (1995), and
- Property and Contract in Economics: The Case for Economic Democracy (1992).
The blog’s name is from the 1995 book. It refers to the intellectual style of Albert O. Hirschman who tried to approach each question or problem from the disciplines appropriate to the problem rather than try to bend every question to one’s academic specialization–as evidenced by his 1981 book: Essays in Trespassing: Economics to politics and beyond.
Many of the posts will shamelessly try to use current events or debates as a “hook” or entry point to hawk ideas from one of my old published or unpublished papers on my website: www.ellerman.org .
Posts about mathematical logic and other math-related topics are in a separate companion blog: www.mathblog.ellerman.org .
I can always be reached at: david(at-sign)ellerman.org
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I’m happy and interested to find that you have a blog. I recently completed my masters in international relations and political economics, and consistently tried to incorporate key aspects of your arguments on the labor theory of property and co-operatives.
I originally learned of your work in William Greider’s 2003 book, The Soul of Capitalism, and later found an additional treatment in Mark Lutz’s 1999 book, Economics for the Common Good. Your range of work since at least the 1980s in a diversity of journals, from the Journal of Economic Issues to the J of Business Ethics, also holds great interest for me in future research.
On a related note, while recent movies such as Achbar et al’s The Corporation, DiCaprio’s The 11th Hour, and Moore’s Capitalism: A Love Story have included economists and personalities such as Milton Friedman, Herman Daly, Ray Anderson of Interface Carpets, and Omar Freilla of Green Worker Co-ops, I’ve thought that your contributions would make important additions.
Too bad I’m now based in Latin America in the territory of a network of co-operatives and agroecology!
November 11, 2010 @ 9:52 am