Organizations and Markets

Gordon Winston

9 January 2014 at 2:22 pm Dick Langlois Leave a comment

| Dick Langlois |

I was saddened to learn of the recent passing of Gordon Winston, an interesting economist who should have been better known (to readers of this blog) than he was.

I’m sure I knew of Gordon when I was a student at Williams in the early 1970s, but as I didn’t take any economics as an undergraduate, I never had any contact with him. I really first met him when he interviewed me for a job at Williams in 1983 (which I didn’t get — not his fault). We kept in contact for a number of years after that, including during at least one Liberty Fund conference in the 1980s.

Gordon is probably best known for his later work on the economics of higher education, which I use in teaching. But readers might be even more interested in his earlier work on the timing of economic activities, which resulted in a 1982 Cambridge book by that title. In essence, Gordon was trying to work out in detail how to think about time in a production-function model of economic activity, something that the late Armen Alchian had adumbrated in his famous paper “Costs and Output” (the original 1958 RAND working paper version of which is now available here). Gordon cites Lachmann and Shackle, but I think his biggest influence was Georgescu-Roegen. The book ought to be especially interesting to grad students, since I suspect it opens up a lot of ideas for further exploration.

Entry filed under: - Langlois -, Austrian Economics, Education, History of Economic and Management Thought.