János Kornai (
til 1945
'J.
Kornhauser, born January 21,
1928), born in Budapest
, Hungary
, is an
economist noted for his analysis and
criticism of the command economies
of Eastern European communist states.
Biography
Professor Kornai studied philosophy for two years at the Pázmány
Péter University (now called
Eötvös Loránd
University) in Budapest.
He gained his knowledge in economics on his
own, and holds a 'candidate' degree in the field from the Hungarian
Academy of Sciences
. He wrote that he chose to become an
economist after reading Marx's
Das Kapital. He started
working in
Szabad Nép, the Hungarian Communist Party
newspaper, and rose to the rank of editor of news related to the
economy, but after a few years of work, he was fired for lack of
Communist convictions in April 1955.
From 1958 onward Kornai received many invitations to visit foreign
institutions, but he was denied a
passport
by the Hungarian authorities and was not allowed to travel until
1963, after political restrictions had begun to ease.
From 1967 until 1992 he was a Research Professor at the Institute
of Economics, Hungarian Academy of Sciences.
He became
corresponding member (1976), member (1982) of the Hungarian
Academy of Sciences. Kornai joined the faculty of Harvard
University
in Cambridge, Massachusetts, USA, in 1986 and was
named the Allie S. Freed Professor of Economics in 1992. He
retired from Harvard in 2002. In the same year, he became a
Permanent Fellow of
Collegium
Budapest, Institute for Advanced Study.
He is also a
Distinguished Research Professor at Central European
University
.
He was a
Member of the Board of the Hungarian National Bank
(central bank) until
2001, and has authored many economics-related books and
papers.
Works
In the late 1950s, he was among those initiating the use of
mathematical methods in economic planning. He elaborated the
theory of two-level
planning with
Tamás
Lipták and directed the first large-scale economy-wide
multi-level planning project. Professor Kornai's early article
Overcentralization (1953) created a stir in the West and
represented his first disillusionment with the communist
central planning.
His 1971 book,
Anti-Equilibrium, criticizes
neoclassical economics, particularly
general equilibrium
theory.
In his 1980 book,
Economics of Shortage, perhaps his most
influential work, Kornai argued that the chronic shortages seen
throughout Eastern Europe in the late 1970s (and which continued
during the 1980s) were not the consequences of planners’ errors or
the wrong prices, but rather systemic flaws. In his 1988 book,
The Socialist System, The Political Economy of Communism
he argued that the command economy based on the unchallenged
control by a
Marxist-Leninist
communist party leads to a
predominance of
bureaucratic
administration of
state firms,
through
centralized planning
and management, and the use of
administrative pricing to eliminate
the effects of the
market, leading to
individual responses to the incentives of this system, ultimately
causing observable and inescapable economic phenomena known as the
shortage economy. Kornai is very
skeptical of efforts to create
market
socialism.
His later works including
The Road to a Free Economy
(1990),
Highway and Byways (1995),
Struggle and
Hope (1997) and
Welfare in
Transition (2001) deal with
macroeconomic aspects and the interaction
between politics and economic policy in the period of economic
transition in the
post-Soviet
states. At present he leads a comprehensive research project,
Honesty and Trust in the Light of Post-Socialist
Transition at
Collegium
Budapest, where he now is an
emeritus fellow.
Kornai is a member of the
Royal Swedish Academy of
Sciences.
In 2007 he published a memoir,
By Force of Thought, on his
research and the social and political environments in which he did
his work.
References
See also
External links
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