 Home page Contributors Economics is a complex topic because it integrates the complexity of the combination of nature and all human activities. The quality of the contributions to the understanding of how different aspects of human activities contribute to the final performance of the economy, is an important issue. Below, we set out a general list of contributors including, economists, engineers, and social scientists whose work has helped build up the knowledge of the theoretical and practical implications of evolving practice to the policy options embraced by RIP. This list is work in progress and we would welcome suggestions on other workers whose names contributors feel should be added to this list. Kenneth Arrow: Kenneth Arrrow (1921–2017) revealed that close to 80% of economic growth comes from learning by doing or tacit knowledge accumulation. George Boole: George Boole (1815-1864) in 1854 published his work, "The Laws of Thought" which presented a mathematical logic (Boolean logic) of how the human mind learns and makes deductions. He also presented a "reduction method" which is a procedure to take very complex logical sequences of decisions and to reduce the apparent complexity down into a smaller number of logical components which could perform all of the decisions included in the original complex system. James M. Buchanan James Buchanan (1919-2013) was the leading developer of "Constitutional Economics" and the role of public choice. Real Incomes Policy is conceived in the form of an operational branch of constitutional economics. This is achieved by placing optional choices into the hands of corporate management and workforces to effect an effective public choice. However, the constitutional provisions represented by policy regulations and business rules do not uphold a Pareto efficiency or zero-sum situation but rather sustain a positive systemic consisistency or mutial benefit (win-win) that drives the economy towards increasing real incomes based on public choice. Ronald Howard: Ronald Howard (1934) coined the term "decision analysis" and was the major contributor to the creation of decision analysis as a discipline and basis for more optimization in business decision making. Nicholas Kaldor: Nicholas Kaldor (1908–1986) introduced several important concepts within the Keynesian environment. He made more explicit the role of technology, industry and manufacturing in creating the goods and devices used in all sectors to advance the productivity in all sectors. He explained that therefore industry and manufacturing are the main centres of economic growth and that this growth is undermined by offshore investment and policies that do not balance wages against technological advances in productivity. He also explained that economies do not return to an equilibrium position simply because technological advance keeps economies out of balance but moving in a beneficial direction. Nicholas Kaldor worked at the LSE and then became a Fellow of Kings College Cambridge and became Professor of Economics at Cambridge in 1966. Alfred Korzybski Alfred Korzybski (1879-1950) developed General Semantics as opposed to Liguistic Semantics and pointed out the dangers of confusing theory with reality, a common fault in economics. He used the phrase, "The map is not the territory" to encasulate the notion. It was this concept that led the early work leading to the real incomes approach to abandon maps (theory) and observe and record the territory in the form of companies setting prices. Georg Friedrich List: Friedrich List (1789-1846) brought together the important relationships between manufacturing and industry, productivity and national performance linked to technology extension services and the importance of learning. List's life period overalpped Jean-Baptiste Say's but to date, it is not apparent that they had any form of contact. Elton Mayo: Elton Mayo (1880–1949) very much concerned with ways to improve productivity in industry laid a considerable amount of emphasis on the importance of the development of tacit knowledge in helping work forces improve their productivity. Hector Wetherell McNeill Hector McNeill (1944) was the main developer of RIP which emerged initially as a solution to slumpflation. He initiated this work in 1975 realizing that the conventional policy instruments under monetarism and Keynesianism would be unable to tackle slumpflation since the inflation component was a cost-push and not a demand-pull phenomenon. All of the Aggregate Demand Model policy instruments assumed inflation to be a demand-pull phenomenon. Therefore, applying these instruments would cause significant prejudice for constituents. McNeill identified RIP by mid-1976 as an option for tackling inflation caused by cost-push situations. However, he also concluded that inflation is seldom related to demand but under competitive conditions it is strictly related to price setting by companies and not to monetary injection in the economy. This fact was confirmed by the quantitative easing policy period between 2008 to 2022 where massive monetary injections had no immediate impact of the prices of goods and services. However, after a prolonged rise in asset prices, those that were supply side production inputs (land, real estate in the form of offices, retail units, industrial units, warehouses, commodities and energy) initiated a cost push inflation gathering pace in 2021-2022. McNeill used this evidence to explain that the Quantity Theory of Money is flawed because it does not contain 10 variable that represent what he termed "encapsulated asset markets". McNeill identified the Price Performance Ratio (PPR) to measure the contribution of each company to inflation and he proposed the Price Performance Levy (PPL) as an incentive for companies to improve productivity through innovation. Hector McNeill was a member of Clare College Cambridge graduating in 1966 and completing courses at the Economics Faculty in 1966-1967. He was a Fellow of the Food research Institute at Stanford University and completed post-graduate studies at the Schools of Economics and Engineering at Stanford. Gordon Moore: Gordon Moore (1929) published an article "Cramming More Components onto Integrated Circuits" in which he predicted the number doubling approximately every two years as a result of refinement in techniques of circuit production. This statement which turned out to be approximately correct is referred to as Moore's Law. The significance is a constant reduction of costs, rising computational power and lower consumption of energy. Jean-Baptiste Say: Jean-Batiste Say (1767–1832) was an admirer and enthusiastic promoter of Adam Smith's approach to economics, in France. His treatise entitled "A Treatise on Political Economy" with a subtitle of, "The Production, Distribution and Consumption of Wealth" introduced the concept of real growth emanating from innovation brought about by entrepreneurs who found ways to use resources more efficiently. He laid the foundation for linking real growth to innovation and the rising purchasing power of workers to growth in national consumption or aggregate demand. This fundamentally important identity became recognized as Say's law. Say's contributions provided a rational basis for explaining the mechanism whereby the "invisible hand" operates in refining output results in redirections of patterns of consumption. Claude Shannon; Claude Elwood Shannon (1916-2001) recognized the contribution of Boolean Logic and Boolean reduction to optimizing the design of switching circuits. As a result, later, Boolean logic became the fundamental procedure in designing integrated circuits which contribute significantly to manufacturing production systems efficiency. Adam Smith: Adam Smith (1723–1790) wrote the "The Theory of Moral Sentiments" published in 1759 followed by "The Wealth of Nations" in 1776. The balance of interpretation of the so-called "invisible hand" by taking into account his considerations of moral sentiments was such as to suggest "self-interest" might be interpreted as being more in the sense of vocation. as opposed to the survival of the fittest. Robert Solow: Robert Solow (1925) also worked on the contribution of technology to economic growth. Thorstein Veblen: Thorstein Veblen (1857–1929) developed the broad concept of economics needing to become an evolutionary science taking into account the changes in technology on the economy. In the early 1920s he identified the transformation on business decision making away from technological development issues towards a preoccupation with financial measures often divorced from the underlying productive processes. Theodore Wright: Theodore Wright (1895–1970) produced a detailed study of the progress in the efficiency with which work forces complete repetitive tasks identifying the learning curve. His 1938 study data came from the manufacture of aircraft frames. The learning curve enables process planners to calculate the likely projected future reduction in unit costs based on the learning curve - generally referred to as Wright's Law. |