ABSTRACT
On October 23, 2014 the heterodox micro theorist Fred Lee, a tireless advocate of heterodox economics for more than three decades, succumbed to lung cancer at the absurdly early age of 64. He is survived by his wife, Ruth, their daughter Sally, and two granddaughters. He also leaves behind a magnificent legacy of published work and substantial organizational achievements, not to mention many friends and colleagues.1 When he entered Rutgers, Fred recalled, he already thought of himself as a Post Keynesian-heterodox economist.2 In the late 1970s Rutgers was a stronghold of heterodoxy. He was taught by Eichner, Paul Davidson, Jan Kregel, and Nina Shapiro, who were members of the faculty, and in Fall 1978 he took a course in the history of economic thought with Alessandro Roncaglia, who was a visiting professor. In his second year at Rutgers (1979-1980), Fred himself taught an introductory microeconomics course. He was already working on his first major article, on the Oxford Economists’ Research Group (Lee 1981). The Post Keynesian group at Rutgers was soon dispersed (see Lee 2009, 88-89, 93-94), but not before Fred had benefited very greatly from it. After this unusual, and unusually late, beginning, Fred’s academic career lasted barely a third of a century. Between 1981 and 1991 he taught, in rapid succession, at the University of California Riverside, at Roosevelt University in Chicago, and across the Atlantic at Staffordshire Polytechnic (now the University of Staffordshire). In 1991 he moved a short distance further east, to what would soon be De Montfort University (then still Leicester Polytechnic), where Peter Riach was making a brave attempt to create a pluralistic economics department on ‘the zoo principle-two of everything.’ Sadly Riach could only afford one of everything, and he then succumbed to managerial pressure and moved the department from the city campus in Leicester to a new building in the suburban wastelands of Milton Keynes (emphatically no relation!), where the brave experiment ended badly. In a sense its failure was good for Fred, who was now able to spend the second half of his career in the much more hospitable environment provided by the University of Missouri-Kansas City. It was certainly good news for his new employer. Between 2001 and 2014 Fred was ‘Mister Micro’ to Randall Wray’s ‘Mister Macro’ at UMKC-an allusion, of course, to the roles played by George
Stigler and Milton Friedman 40 years earlier in Chicago. Between them Fred, Randall, and their colleagues established Kansas City as the global capital of Post Keynesian economics. Fred’s own detailed account of his department’s organization, ideals and progress (Lee 2012) ends by listing some of its brightest young graduates, all of whom he had taught: Flavia Dantas, Gyun Cheol Gu, Tae-Hee Jo, Joëlle Leclaire, Yeva Nersisyan, Robert Scott, Pavlina Tcherneva, Zdravka Todorova, and Éric Tymoigne. As Jo noted in his obituary for Fred, “he will be remembered as an inspirational teacher and wonderful mentor who taught students how to do heterodox economics in a pluralistic, realistic, and integrative manner, and who cared about his students from the bottom of his heart.” As if teaching and research were not enough, Fred also played an important role in the institutions that sprang up around heterodox economics in the final quarter of the twentieth century. In the United Kingdom he set up the Association for Heterodox Economics in 1999, angered by the refusal of the august and ultra-orthodox Royal Economic Society to permit a heterodox presence at its annual conferences (Lee 2009, 197-200; see Chapter 2 in this volume for the subsequent history of the AHE). Fred’s achievement inspired heterodox economists around the world, not least Peter Kriesler of the University of New South Wales, who established the Society of Heterodox Economists in Australia a couple of years later. Fred remained involved with the AHE after his return to the United States. In 2004 he was one of the academics who took part in the third postgraduate workshop in Manchester on advanced research methods organized by the AHE, coordinated by Paul Downward and funded by the United Kingdom’s Economic and Social Research Council. Fred had recently published a paper on the use of grounded theory (Lee 2002), and his session at the workshop was on the application of grounded theory research methods to the study of pricing. One of the student participants, Therese Jefferson, found all the sessions to be extremely useful for a doctoral student interested in heterodox economics and research methods-Fred’s most of all (see Chapter 4 of this volume). “Fred was also very generous with his time,” she recalled ten years later,
and seemed to be present at any gathering that was officially part of the workshop or otherwise. Several other academics at the workshop were similarly generous, but it was Fred who had engaged seriously with debates about grounded theory and this definitely left its mark.
