to Louis Pasinetti (1930-2023) is not a name known to the general public. But he was one of major economists of our time, known internationally in the academic world, and his contributions to the foundations of economic theory they have a profound importance, with repercussions on political and economic policy choices.
Her jobs, often published simultaneously in English and Italian, have been translated into many languages – in Korean, for example, in a series of 'modern economics classics'.
Who was Pasinetti
Born in Zanica in the province of Bergamo, working student at the Cattolica in Milan where he is a student of Sir Lombardini, gets a scholarship to Cambridge (where he studies with Piero Sraffa and with the students of Keynes, Richard Khan e Joan Robinson), then to Harvard and Oxford.
In 1951 it becomes fellow of the King's College, Cambridge e tutor at the University. He will always remain tied to Cambridge, even after winning the chair in Italy, at the Cattolica in Milan, where he will teach for many years. Many of his students.
Together with him in Cambridge other Italian economists, such as Luigi Spaventa e Pierangelo Garegnani, attracted by the fame of Sraffa, form what is universally known as the Anglo-Italian school, which includes Cambridge professors and many economists who carry out at least part of their studies in that environment and are influenced by it. It is an alternative trend to the dominant theory which views economics as the science of scarcity and utility, of supply and demand, and extols the invisible hand of the market, which if left free to operate would lead to optimal outcomes in the allocation of resources, including full employment of workers, automatically solving the problem of income distribution.
Keynes had argued for the possibility of persistent unemployment and of crisis; subsequently Sraffa (which Keynes himself had wanted to call to Cambridge) demonstrates that the dominant theory of distribution (and employment) is wrong. In the debate that opens, the big guns of the company intervene in defense of that theory US Cambridge, as paul samuelson e Robert Solow, with successive trips: Pasinetti (with Garegnani and Spaventa) is so successful in fending off the counter-attack that Samuelson is forced to admit his mistakes.
Pasinetti and the comparison with the two Cambridges
Il debate between two Cambridges it is culpably ignored by those who continue to support the thesis of the invisible hand of the market, or some variant thereof. Thus, public intervention in regulating the trend of the economy is seen by the dominant neoliberal thought as a negative fact, in any case to be limited to the short term, and persistent unemployment is now a structural feature of our societies. Pasinetti he didn't get the Nobel which he would have deserved (also for his very important contributions to the reconstruction of economic theory, but which I cannot illustrate here), while after his two rival friends, samuelson e solo, they had it: many theorists of efficient financial markets, denied from the events of the last decades after being denied, on a theoretical level, by Pasinetti and by other great economists such as Hyman Minsky.
