ABSTRACT
I first met Alfred Eichner when I was still a McGill University doctoral student attending a conference on post-Keynesian inflation and employment theory, organized by Paul Davidson at Rutgers University in April 1977. That initial contact with him seeded in my mind the proposition that inflation had to do neither with the quantity of money (in accordance with the ubiquitous monetarist credo of the time) nor with labor market phenomena per se (as depicted in the original Phillips curve analysis of the labor market). Our subsequent meetings cemented a relation that continued from the late 1970s, when he was still teaching at the State University of New York (in Purchase, New York), through the 1980s, when he was at Rutgers University (in New Brunswick, New Jersey), until his untimely death (in Closter, New Jersey) on February 10, 1988. During that memorable decade, we met several times, including at three conferences held at the University of Ottawa in March 1981, November 1983, and October 1984.
