János Kornai
János Kornai ( born January 21, 1928 in Budapest) is a Hungarian economist.
Life and work
Kornai is the son of a Jewish lawyer who was murdered in 1944 in Auschwitz concentration camp. He studied history and philosophy at the Karl Marx University of Economic Sciences in Budapest. 1955 to 1958 he went to the newly established Institute of Economics of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences, where he received his doctorate in 1956. In 1961 he received his doctorate at the Karl Marx University, Doctor of Economics and 1965 again from the Hungarian Academy of Sciences and Dr. Sc. (roughly equivalent to the German Habilitation ). From 1958 to 1960 he worked as an economist at the planning office of light industry in Budapest. 1960 to 1963 he was head of the Institute of Textile Industry in Budapest and from 1963 to 1967 head of the computer center at the Hungarian Academy of Sciences. Guest professorships led him in 1964 to the London School of Economics, 1966 University of Sussex, 1968 Stanford University, 1970 Yale University, 1972 Princeton University, 1973 Stanford University, 1976-77, Stockholm University, 1981 University of Geneva, University of Munich in 1983, 1983-84 Institute for Advanced Study, Princeton, and Harvard University in 1984-85. From 1967 to 1993 he was a research professor at the Institute of Economics of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences, from 1992 to 2002 at the Collegium Budapest. From 1986 on, he was also at Harvard: first as a professor and since 1991 as Allie S. Freed Professor of Economics -. He retired in 2002. Since 2005 he is a research professor at the Central European University.
His dissertation Overcentralization was the first critical book about the planned economy, which was written by a resident of a communist country. This Kornai called for a decentralization of the economy and a greater use of market forces. He was one of the first who introduced the mathematical optimization in the Hungarian economic planning ( Mathematical Planning of Structural Decisions ). In his influential book, The Economics of Shortage, he showed that the chronic shortage of goods is an inevitable consequence of the traditional communist system. After the fall of communism, he dealt with the transition to the Western economic system: In The Road to a Free Economy, he suggested a rapid stabilization with gradual privatization and reform of the welfare state at.
Kornai is married to the economist Zsuzsa Dániel and has three children.
Works
Kornai published nearly 200 scientific articles and the following books:
- Overcentralization in Economic Administration. Oxford University Press, Oxford [ et al ] 1959.
- Mathematical Planning of Structural Decisions. North -Holland, Amsterdam 1967, German as: Mathematical Methods in the planning of the economic structure. The publishing industry, Berlin 1967.
- Anti- Equilibrium. On economic systems theory and the tasks of research. North -Holland, Amsterdam 1971, German as: Anti- equilibrium. About the theory of economic systems and associated research tasks. Springer, Berlin [ ua], 1975, ISBN 0-7204-3055-0, ISBN 0-444-10122-5.
- Rush versus Harmonic Growth. North -Holland, Amsterdam, 1972, ISBN 0-7204-3407-6.
- Economics of Shortage. 2 volumes, North -Holland, Amsterdam, 1980, ISBN 0-444-86059-2, ISBN 0-444-85426-6 (Volume 1), ISBN 0-444-86058-4 ( Volume 2).
- Growth, Shortage and Efficiency. Basil Blackwell, Oxford, 1982, ISBN 0-631-12787-9; University of California Press, Berkeley and Los Angeles, 1982, ISBN 0-520-04901-2.
- Contradictions and dilemmas. Corvina, Budapest, 1985, ISBN 963-13-2063-4; MIT Press, Cambridge, 1986, ISBN 0-262-11107-1.
- Vision and Reality, Market and State: New Studies on the Socialist Economy and Society. Corvina, Budapest, 1990, ISBN 963-13-3013-3; Harvester Wheatsheaf, Hemel Hempstead and New York, 1990, ISBN 0-7450-0745-7; Routledge, New York, 1990, ISBN 0-415-90285-1.
- The Road to a Free Economy. Shifting from a Socialist System. The Example of Hungary. WW Norton, New York, ISBN 0-393-02887-9, ISBN 0-393-30691-7; HVG Kiadó, Budapest 1990.
- The Socialist System. The Political Economy of Communism. Princeton University Press, Princeton, 1992, ISBN 0-691-04298-5, ISBN 0-691-00393-9; Oxford University Press, Oxford 1992, ISBN 0-19-828751-8, ISBN 0-19-828776-3 (online), German as: The socialist system. The Political Economy of Communism. Nomos Verlagsgesellschaft, Baden -Baden 1995, ISBN 3- 7890-4086 -X.
- Highway and Byways. Studies on Socialist Reform and Post Socialist Transition. MIT Press, Cambridge, 1995, ISBN 0-262-11198-5, German as: On the road. Essays on the economic transformation in Hungary. Metropolis Verlag, Marburg 1996, ISBN 3-89518-092-0.
- Struggle and Hope. Essays on Stabilization and Reform in a Post- Socialist Economy. Edward Elgar Publishing, Chaltenham [ua ] 1997, ISBN 1-85898-606-0.
- Paying the Bill for Goulash - Communism. Atlantic Research and Publications and Columbia University Press, New York 2000, ISBN 0-88033 - 455- X.
- With Karen Eggleston: Welfare, Choice and Solidarity in Transition. Reforming the Health Sector in Eastern Europe. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge 2001, ISBN 0-521-79036-0.
- By Force of Thought. Irregular Memoirs of an Intellectual Journey. The MIT Press, Cambridge, Massachusetts [ ua] 2006, ISBN 0-262-11302-3, ISBN 978-0-262-11302-1.