- John Roemer
John E. Roemer is an American
economist andpolitical scientist . He is currently the Elizabeth S. and A. Varick Stout Professor of Political Science and Economics atYale University . Prior to joining Yale, he was on the economics faculty at theUniversity of California, Davis , and before entering academia Roemer worked for several years as a labor organizer. He is married to Natasha Roemer and lives inNew York City .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 , from where he was expelled for his political activism during the time of the Vietnam War. He eventually received his Ph.D. in economics from Berkeley in 1974.Academic Contributions
Roemer is famous for his work in the fields of economic philosophy and
distributive justice . In recent years he has focused his attention on the topic ofequal opportunity . In his book, "Equality of Opportunity", he argues that society must take the action necessary to ensure that an individual's economic (or welfare) prospects are independent of attributes such as race, gender and the economic class to which one is born. Instead, one's achieved level of welfare should depend solely on the effort that one exerts in life. In another recent monograph, "Democracy, Education and Equality", Roemer claims thatdemocracy as a political mechanism cannot guarantee, even in the long run, that an individual's prospects will be independent of the wealth or education of his/her parents, and thus we cannot rely ondemocracy alone for implementing theequality of opportunity concept of justice.Previously in his career, Roemer was part of the
analytical marxism school of thought, and served as one of its founders along withG.A. Cohen ,Jon Elster , and others members of theSeptember Group . His earlier books such as, "Analytical Foundations of Marxian Economic Theory", "A General Theory of Exploitation and Class", "Value Exploitation and Class", and "Free to Lose: An Introduction to Marxian Economic Philosophy", indicate his strong interest in leftist economic philosophy, and his emphasis on the importance of providing game-theoretic and microeconomic foundations for Marxist theory.Roemer has also developed new ideas in political economy. In his book "Political Competition", he argues that the traditional Downsian model of political competition in a one-dimensional policy-space is unsatisfactory because it leaves many questions inadequately answered, such as why the poor do not expropriate the rich in democracies. In multiple dimensions, however, Nash Equilibria tend not to exist, and thus without new tools it is impossible for us to predict what policies parties will propose. Roemer offers a solution to this problem through the concept of Party-Unanimity Nash Equilibrium, or simply PUNE, in which the factions of
political parties -- themilitants ,opportunist s andreformers -- must unanimously agree to make deviations from a givenpolicy for that policy to not be a part of the equilibrium. This kind of unanimity is often rare, and there tend to be several PUNE even when there are no regular Nash equilibria, thus creating the opposite problem ofmultiple equilibria . Nevertheless, the PUNE concept has proven to be very useful, and Roemer and his coauthors have used it to study problems such asvoter racism andxenophobia .External links
* [http://pantheon.yale.edu/~jer39/ Homepage]
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