A note from Juan Espinosa
On Wednesday, November 15, 2017, passed away Jaroslav Vanek, an exceptional person, a guide, a great economist and until his last days Professor Emeritus of Cornell University, in Ithaca, New York, United States.
He was widely and internationally recognized for his multiple works and theoretical developments in the field on economic participation, theory and practice of the economics of labor-managed, self-managed and cooperative enterprises, and previously, at the beginning of his academic and professional career, for his innovative and enlightening writings in the field of economic and international trade.
Jaroslav, was born in Prague, Czechoslovakia in April 1930, son of Josef and Jaroslava Vanek. His early years were spent in that country, where he studied until graduating from high school – in the Prague Gymnasium – in 1949, in which he was distinguished as a very good sportsman. However, the life in those years began to be troubled, when already between 1938 and 1945 his country was invaded by the forces of the Axis and, a few years later, after Yalta, Czechoslovakia was left in Soviet hands. The situation was aggravated in such a way, that in September 1949 the Vanek family had to flee and take refuge for political reasons in Western Germany, where they initially arrived at a refugee camp in Munich, they would later move to Geneva and Paris.
It could be said that the profound drama of the second world war and its immediate aftermath, as well as the closing of borders and the creation of a communist world in all Eastern Europe, awoke in Jaroslav Vanek an unstoppable purpose to make our world a place more humane and filled with solidarity, as well as later in his life he also added to his concerns the protection of the environment, being a pioneer in new ways of harnessing solar energy, especially for the poor and the weakest members of society.
The desire to improve the conditions of life of the common people, led him to study economics which in 1952 he received a Diploma in Statistics, Mathematics and Economics at the Sorbonne, and then obtained a graduate degree in economics at the University of Geneva in 1954. After his studies, he stayed in Geneva working as a professional economist, and while there he was fortunate enough to meet Prof. Charles Kindleberger of MIT’s passing by Geneva on a short stay.
In 1955, Jaroslav Vanek’s professional and academic development began a substantive change when he decided to leave Geneva and travel to the United States to continue his studies leading to a doctorate degree in Economics at MIT under the supervision of Professor Charles Kindleberger of great international prestige.
Already in 1957, he received his Ph.D. in Economics from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, which allowed him to begin teaching economics at Harvard University. In 1958, he married a doctoral candidate in History at the same university, Wilda Marrafino of New York, who thus became his companion in family and ideals of life.
However, the intellectual and ethical concerns of Jaroslav Vanek took him to a second big change in their academic and international life. In 1964, he moved with Wilda to Ithaca, New York, to assume a position of Professor in the Department of Economics at the College of Arts and Sciences from Cornell University. In this new position, he began a gradual but steady transition, from the themes of international economy towards emerging themes in the economics of self-management, and its installation and development in different regions of the world.
Thus, after posting two great works of his former economics and international trade subjects: 1. General Equilibrium of International Discrimination: The Case of Customs Unions, Harvard University Press, 1965; and 2-Maximal Economic Growth, in 1968; quickly began to publish in the emergent new field: first, Producer Cooperatives and Labor-managed Systems, Edward Elgar, in 1968; and then his most famous work, a book of academic text comprising the micro and macroeconomics of a self-managed system: The General Theory of Labor-managed Market Economies, Cornell University Press, 1970.
The fact that, by the end of the decade of the sixties Jaroslav Vanek began this crucial and important turn towards a more participatory socio-economic system and with labor self-management in the entire market economy of a country, allowed him to organize an academic program of theoretical and practical studies in the Department of Economics at Cornell, which after a couple of years of experimental operation, was transformed in 1970 into the Program on Participation and work Managed Systems, better known as PPLMS for its acronym in English. The formation of this center at Cornell, was soon transformed into a true lighthouse for the majority of countries and academic centers in the Western Hemisphere, at a moment in which on the one hand the neoclassical model was in a stage of exhaustion and, on the other, a new model of reform pro social economy was imposed in Europe and the United States, while the center produced its first ideas on the development for countries of the Third World and the Yugoslav economy adopted a stance independent of the two great blocks of the cold war, which dominated in the second half of the 20th century.
Personally, it was precisely in those years (1969) that I had the extraordinary opportunity to meet Jaroslav Vanek, when I was planning to carry out postgraduate studies in the United States and could not find the best or the most proper place in line with innovative trends. It was a get-together of just a few minutes and I remember well that he invited me immediately, without any doubt, to continue my studies in its Program on Participation (PPLMS) in the Department of Economics at Cornell. From that moment on I could observe, study, and be part of an extraordinary blossoming of: teachings and lectures; consulting and international travel; as well as important and enlightening publications in the best editorials of the time (all of them created, conducted and promoted by Jaroslav Vanek, in his most interesting a challenging years of his life).
It is impossible in this brief review to apprehend the enormous contribution of Jaroslav Vanek in all selected areas, but as a brief example, to include among his main publications of those years are:
• Participatory Economy: An Evolutionary Hypothesis and a Strategy for Development; Cornell University Press, 1971 and 1975.
• Self-Management: Economic Liberation of Man, (editor); Penguin Books, 1975.
• The Labor-Managed Economy: Essays; Cornell University Press, 1977.
Among the multiple trips, consultancies to companies, governments and conferences, some of them asking me to accompany him as an Assistant Professor, I recall: in 1971, we traveled to Peru at an invitation of the National Government to Jaroslav Vanek, to advise them on the development and application of the model of the working community (comunidad laboral) and cooperative enterprises. Later, he also advised the Government of Turkey in collaboration with Memeth Uca. He traveled as visiting professor to the Institute of Economics in Belgrade, Yugoslavia in 1972, at the Catholic University of Louvain in 1974 and The Institute of High Social Studies in The Hague, where we meet again with Henk Thomas a good friend and former classmate at Cornell, and met Gerard Kester a great expert in Africa. Among other countries, I can remember Malta, in labor development and a new major contributor with IAFEP (International Association for the Economics of Participation) since those years.
At the end, we can only be thankful for the privilege to have known Jaroslav Vanek. He was an extraordinary human being, a great intellectual, a senior academic, parent and husband exemplary, with unlimited analytical intelligence, great tenacity and clairvoyant humanist which persisted through his life not allowing his mood to decline. We will always remember him as a great pioneer and great conductor. We are sure he will continue accompanying and stimulating us, as time comes, to live our lives more fully and with the biggest contribution as possible, so that the world which surrounds us will become something more human, more participatory and more inclusive than the currently. Farewell Jaroslav, dear professor and friend.
Juan G. Espinosa Civil Engineer, Universidad de Chile
Master and PhD in Economics, Cornell University. |