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EMERITUS PROFESSOR William Vickrey would have been the first to admit that he relished the media attention surrounding his Nobel Prize in Economic Science awarded last Oct. 8. The following day, as he headed off to yet another interview, this time with a Brazilian television station, friends and colleagues hinted that it might be time to call it a day; "I'm going," he replied, "because they asked me to."Columbia's Economics Department is no stranger to the honor of the Nobel Prize, which was extended to this discipline in 1968. But Professor Vickrey's story attracted more attention than those of most winners because of two factors: the extent to which his ideas had previously escaped media attention during his 60 years at Columbia and his tragic demise en route to an economics
conference three days after the Nobel announcement.
There is a widespread perception, even among academics, that the discipline of economics is becoming removed from real issues and the policies that deal with them. When the media apparently focus on a man's idiosyncrasies rather than his ideas, this can exacerbate such a perception. Vickrey's Nobel provided an opportunity the press could have grasped: His manifesto, which will appear posthumously in the Journal of Post Keynesian Economics, shows that he cared about urgent issues like budget deficits and was willing to contradict prevailing policy dogmas, such as the mania for balanced federal budgets or the belief that a minimal "non-inflation-accelerating rate of unemployment" of around 6 percent is required to prevent inflation. "Larger deficits," he proposed, "...are necessary and proper means to mitigate unemployment as the far greater evil in terms of human welfare."(1)
According to Virgil Renzulli, associate vice president for public affairs at Columbia, the handling by the press of Vickrey's prize and his death was "exceptional and sensitive." Representatives of more than 20 news organizations turned up at two hours' notice for Vickrey's first press conference; the New York Times sent a reporter to follow the professor about his daily business for three days to gain an insight into his daily routine, which was beginning to intrigue the public. Several of the same reporters sent personal messages of condolence to the press office when his death was announced.
Emeritus Professor C. Lowell Harriss, Vickrey's friend and colleague who collected his prize in Stockholm, agreed that the daily printed media he had seen sensitively handled the human-interest side of Vickrey's story; he singled out the New York Times obituary and the Boston Globe article. Yet the theoretical basis of Vickrey's work was often ignored. Shirley Johnson, Vickrey's friend for more than 30 years who now teaches at Vassar College, describes the general portrayal as an extreme emphasis on applications, such that "the media came across as putting economics down as a discipline." One notable exception was John Cassidy in the New Yorker (Dec. 2), himself an advocate of greater press skepticism toward economic theories generally, who wrote that most media reports credulously "glossed over the details and instead stressed the supposed practical importance of the contributions Vickrey and [co-prize winner James] Mirrlees had made."
The oft-quoted title of Vickrey and Mirrlees' work, "theory of incentives under asymmetric information," was rarely expanded. Instead, generalized phrases caught the public eye: The Economist, for example, wrote that Vickrey was awarded the prize for "getting people to tell the truth." The New York Times said that while Mirrlees concentrated on mathematics, "Mr. Vickrey's restless intellect has covered more ground," but went on to explain Vickrey's auction theory -- in which the winner pays only the second-highest bid -- with simplified illustrations.
Moreover, Vickrey's comment that his prize-winning 1961 paper was "one of my digressions into abstract economics" was often misunderstood. This, says Johnson, was Vickrey's idiosyncratic form of modesty, not a license to dwell exclusively upon practical schemes such as optimal pricing for traffic jams rather than the complex theory that reinforced them or his ideas on other topics that are accessible to the lay audience, such as budget deficits. The image of Vickrey as a dogged eccentric was not helped by frequent references to his roller skating to work or to habits such as "dozing off in seminars" (only to awaken suddenly with astute questions), which Harriss believed detracted from the real man. Yet policy-makers rather than the press, according to Renzulli, deserve the blame for the lack of attention Vickrey received before winning the prize. Nor, Harriss notes, should one expect the media to grasp fully the theoretical concepts that lie behind the type of economics research that hits the headlines.
Overall, then, the press served Columbia and Vickrey relatively well, publicizing at least some of the tenets of his work and above all spurring debate both inside and outside the economics profession. Promoting such discussion is perhaps the most effective way in which the media can advance the pursuit of knowledge. Professor Johnson summed it up: "If all you knew about Vickrey was from the media, you would not have a full sense of what the man was about," but had he lived to read his coverage, "he would have been thrilled by what he saw." -- Susannah Rodgers
Related links...
The Nobel Prize Internet Archive
John Maynard Keynes, History of Mathematics archive, University of St. Andrews, Scotland
1. Vickrey, William. "A Trans-Keynesian Manifesto." Journal of Post Keynesian Economics, vol. 19, no. 4 (summer 1997), forthcoming. Excerpts provided courtesy of Paul Davidson, editor.
SUSANNAH RODGERS is a visiting research fellow at the Jerome Levy Economics Institute in Annandale-on-Hudson, N.Y., and has written for The Economist.PHOTO CREDIT: Joe Pineiro.
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