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John Roemer
John E. Roemer (/ˈroʊmər/; born February 1, 1945) is an American economist and political scientist.
He is the Elizabeth S. and A. Varick Stout Professor of Political Science and Economics at Yale University. Before Yale, he was on the economics faculty at the University of California, Davis, and before entering academia Roemer worked for several years as a labor organizer. He is married to Natasha Roemer, with whom he has two daughters.
Roemer was born in Washington, D.C. to Ruth Roemer and Milton Roemer.
Roemer received his A.B. in mathematics summa cum laude from Harvard in 1966. He then enrolled as a graduate student in mathematics at the University of California, Berkeley. He became intensely involved in the anti-Vietnam-War movement, transferred to the doctoral program in economics, and was suspended by the university for his political activities. He taught mathematics in San Francisco secondary schools for five years. Eventually he returned to Berkeley and received his Ph.D. in economics in 1974.
Roemer is fellow of the Econometric Society, a past Guggenheim fellow and Russell Sage fellow, a member of American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and a corresponding fellow of the British Academy. He was past president of the Society for Social Choice and Welfare and served on the editorial boards of many journals in economics, political science, and philosophy. Roemer served on the advisory board of Academics Stand Against Poverty (ASAP).
Roemer has contributed mainly to six areas: Marxian economics, distributive justice, political competition, equity and climate change, and the theory of cooperation.
Roemer's early work was an attempt to state the main themes of Marxian economics using the tools of general equilibrium and game theory. In Roemer (1982), he proposed a model of agents who were differentiated by their endowments and had to choose occupations—involving either selling labor, hiring labor, or working on one's own capital stock. In optimizing with respect to market prices, agents choose one of five class positions, each consisting of various combinations of these three activities. This gives rise to a class structure, whose agricultural nomenclature would be landlords (who only hire labor), rich peasants (who hire labor and work themselves on their fields), middle peasants (who only work for themselves and do not participate in the labor market), poor peasants (who work on their own plot and sell labor), and landless laborers (who only sell labor). Independently of this taxonomy, individuals are either exploiters or exploited, depending upon whether they consume goods embodying more or less labor than they expend. The central result, the Class Exploitation Correspondence Principle (CECP), states that individuals who optimize by hiring labor are necessarily exploiters, and those who optimize by selling labor are exploited. Thus, a classical Marxian principle, taken as an observed fact in Marx's writings, emerges here as a theorem. Microfoundations are provided for the relationship between exploitation and class.
In simple models (e.g., that of Leontief), the definition of 'labor embodied in goods' is straightforward. With more complicated production sets, it is not, and hence the definition of exploitation is not obvious. Roemer's program was then to propose definitions of embodied labor time, for economies with more general production sets, which would preserve the CECP. This led to the observation that, for general production sets, embodied labor time cannot be defined before one knows equilibrium prices. Thus, contrary to Marx, labor value is not a concept which is more fundamental than prices. Roemer's work is considered one of the seminal works of Analytical marxism.
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John Roemer
John E. Roemer (/ˈroʊmər/; born February 1, 1945) is an American economist and political scientist.
He is the Elizabeth S. and A. Varick Stout Professor of Political Science and Economics at Yale University. Before Yale, he was on the economics faculty at the University of California, Davis, and before entering academia Roemer worked for several years as a labor organizer. He is married to Natasha Roemer, with whom he has two daughters.
Roemer was born in Washington, D.C. to Ruth Roemer and Milton Roemer.
Roemer received his A.B. in mathematics summa cum laude from Harvard in 1966. He then enrolled as a graduate student in mathematics at the University of California, Berkeley. He became intensely involved in the anti-Vietnam-War movement, transferred to the doctoral program in economics, and was suspended by the university for his political activities. He taught mathematics in San Francisco secondary schools for five years. Eventually he returned to Berkeley and received his Ph.D. in economics in 1974.
Roemer is fellow of the Econometric Society, a past Guggenheim fellow and Russell Sage fellow, a member of American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and a corresponding fellow of the British Academy. He was past president of the Society for Social Choice and Welfare and served on the editorial boards of many journals in economics, political science, and philosophy. Roemer served on the advisory board of Academics Stand Against Poverty (ASAP).
Roemer has contributed mainly to six areas: Marxian economics, distributive justice, political competition, equity and climate change, and the theory of cooperation.
Roemer's early work was an attempt to state the main themes of Marxian economics using the tools of general equilibrium and game theory. In Roemer (1982), he proposed a model of agents who were differentiated by their endowments and had to choose occupations—involving either selling labor, hiring labor, or working on one's own capital stock. In optimizing with respect to market prices, agents choose one of five class positions, each consisting of various combinations of these three activities. This gives rise to a class structure, whose agricultural nomenclature would be landlords (who only hire labor), rich peasants (who hire labor and work themselves on their fields), middle peasants (who only work for themselves and do not participate in the labor market), poor peasants (who work on their own plot and sell labor), and landless laborers (who only sell labor). Independently of this taxonomy, individuals are either exploiters or exploited, depending upon whether they consume goods embodying more or less labor than they expend. The central result, the Class Exploitation Correspondence Principle (CECP), states that individuals who optimize by hiring labor are necessarily exploiters, and those who optimize by selling labor are exploited. Thus, a classical Marxian principle, taken as an observed fact in Marx's writings, emerges here as a theorem. Microfoundations are provided for the relationship between exploitation and class.
In simple models (e.g., that of Leontief), the definition of 'labor embodied in goods' is straightforward. With more complicated production sets, it is not, and hence the definition of exploitation is not obvious. Roemer's program was then to propose definitions of embodied labor time, for economies with more general production sets, which would preserve the CECP. This led to the observation that, for general production sets, embodied labor time cannot be defined before one knows equilibrium prices. Thus, contrary to Marx, labor value is not a concept which is more fundamental than prices. Roemer's work is considered one of the seminal works of Analytical marxism.