Paul Davidson (economist)

Davidson did not originally choose economics as a profession. His primary training was in both chemistry and biology, for which he received B.Sc. degrees from Brooklyn College in 1950.^[1] He was a graduate student in biochemistry at the University of Pennsylvania, but switched to economics, receiving his MBA from the City University of New York in 1955, and completing his PhD at the University of Pennsylvania in 1959.

J. Barkley Rosser Jr. from the Levy Economics Institute describes how, despite being accepted to graduate programs at Harvard, M.I.T., Berkeley and Brown, Davidson accepted an offer to the University of Pennsylvania which came with a generous financial aid package, which allowed him and his wife Louise, to start a family.^[2]

During his seven decades as an economist, Davidson's professional positions^[3] included:

• Visiting Scholar, Schwartz Center For Economic Policy Analysis, New School 2004-2014
• Advisory Board, Institute for New Economic Thinking 2010-
• Holly Chair of Excellence in Political Economy, University of Tennessee 1986-2001
• Visiting Professor, University of Nice and Latapsis Research Institute (France) 1990
• Professor of Economics and associate director of the Bureau of Economic Research, Rutgers University 1966-1986
• Professor, International Summer School, Centro di Studi Economici Avanzati (Trieste) 1980-1992
• Visiting Professor, University of Strasbourg (France) 1986
• Visiting Professor, Institute for Advanced Studies (Vienna) 1980-84
• Co-Founding Editor, Journal of Post Keynesian Economics 1978-2014
• Chair, New Brunswick Department of Economics and Allied Sciences, Rutgers University 1975-1978
• Senior Visitor, University of Cambridge, Cambridge, England 1970-71
• Associate Professor of Economics, University of Pennsylvania 1963-1966
• Visiting Lecturer, University of Bristol, England 1964-65
• Assistant Professor, University of Pennsylvania 1961-63
• Assistant Director, Economics Division, Continental Oil Company (Conoco) 1960-61
• Assistant Professor, Rutgers University 1958-60
• Instructor in Economics, University of Pennsylvania 1955-58
• Instructor in Physiological Chemistry, University of Pennsylvania 1950-52

At Cambridge he worked with Joan Robinson to discuss draft chapters of his manuscript Money and the Real World.^[4] The discussions got very heated and she finally refused to speak to him about his work. Soon, when Davidson arrived at his office, he would often find a blank sheet of paper with a hand written question from her. He would spend the morning writing his answer and when Robinson went out for morning coffee, he would put the paper with his answer in her office. When Davidson returned to his office after lunch he would find Robinson's comments scrawled over the paper.^[2]

Davidson had a role in developing Environmental economics after his role as economic advisor to Continental Oil. Davidson was "nearly fired" when he forecast the company would do better if John F. Kennedy won the 1960 United States presidential election but when Kennedy won, though Davidson's counsel was more sought after by management, he and his wife, tired of the corporate environment, left to return to academia.^[2]

Paul Davidson warned of the impending subprime mortgage crisis in January 2008^[5] and explicitly contested Alan Greenspan's recommendation for a market-based solution to let “housing prices (and security pegged to mortgages) fall until investors see them as bargains and start buying, stabilizing the economy,^[6]” instead accurately predicting that “if Congress does nothing, then a year from today we may be mired in the Greatest Recession since the Great Depression.^[5]” Ten months later when the economy collapsed, Greenspan admitted in Congressional testimony to be shocked that his free-market ideology was flawed.^[7]

Davidson has appeared before United States congressional subcommittees and provided testimony twenty times from 1973 to 1985^[3] mostly on energy and antitrust issues.

Davidson has authored or co-authored 22 books, including Who's Afraid of John Maynard Keynes? Challenging Economic Governance in an Age of Growing Inequality^[8] and hundreds of articles.

Davidson and Sidney Weintraub founded the Journal of Post Keynesian Economics in 1978. Davidson continued as editor of that journal until 2014. He was also a contributor to the Center for Full Employment and Stability. The CFEPS website (see Other Contributors: Paul Davidson Archived 2018-07-27 at the Wayback Machine) contains more biographical information about him, as well as a list of his publications, with links to a few.

Edward Elgar Publishing published a three-volume Essays in Honour of Paul Davidson series starting in 1996. They include

• Arestis, Philip (1996). Keynes, Money and the Open Economy. Essays in Honour of Paul Davidson: Volume One. Edward Elgar. ISBN 978-1-85898-312-7.
• Arestis, Philip (1997). Employment, Economic Growth and the Tyranny of the Market. Essays in Honour of Paul Davidson: Volume Two. Edward Elgar. ISBN 978-1-85898-313-4.
• Arestis, Philip (1999). Method, Theory and Policy in Keynes. Essays in Honour of Paul Davidson: Volume Three. Edward Elgar. ISBN 978-1-85898-626-5.

See comprehensive (but not complete) list of Paul Davidson publications list on / Google Scholar

Davidson died in Chicago on June 20, 2024, at the age of 93.^[9]