ABSTRACT
I believe that I was Alfred Eichner’s first graduate student, and he was certainly the first economics professor I had to make an impact on me as an economics student. In September 1976, I entered Columbia University to complete my undergraduate education in economics in preparation for graduate school. For the first semester, I read Kalecki, Hall and Hitch, Andrews, and many studies on pricing, which enabled me to write a paper titled “Price Theory, the Firm and Manufacturing Business” for a class I was taking from John Eatwell. In the spring semester, my reading included Eichner’s Megacorp and Oligopoly (1976). Thus, when I first met him in February 1977, I wanted to talk about the determination of the profit markup. However, Eichner had already left this kind of question behind him and was starting the macrodynamics project that would occupy him for the rest of his life, culminating in his manuscript The Macrodynamics of Advanced Market Economies (1987a). So when I wanted to talk about the profit markup, he gave me a copy of the page proofs of “The Geometry of Macrodynamic Balance” (1977) to read.
