BOOKS
The Rubber Industry, 1948.
West African Trade, 1954.
The Economics of Under-Developed Countries, with B.S. Yamey, 1957.
Economic Analysis and Policy in Under-developed Countries, 1957.
United States Aid and Indian Economic Development, 1959.
Indian Economic Policy and Development, 1961.
Markets, Market Control and Marketing Boards, with B.S. Yamey, 1968.
Dissent on Development, 1971.
Equality, the Third World and Economic Delusion, 1981.
Reality and Rhetoric: Studies in the economics of development, 1984.
The Development Frontier: Essays in Applied Economics, 1991
From Subsistence to Exchange 2002 (on line at Questia)
BIOGRAPHICAL OVERVIEW
was born in Hungary in 1915 and arrived in Britain in 1934. At various times he held senior posts at Cambridge and the London School of Economics where he held a chair from 1960 to 1983. Unlike most of the people featured in the Revivalist so far, much can be found about him on line.
EXTRACTS from the OBITUARY
In fact, Bauer had two problems as an economist. Firstly, in the mysterious way that these things happen, he chose to get interested in free market
economics at a time when it was utterly and completely out of fashion - in a way that is now hard to imagine. Harry G. Johnson in his book The Shadow Of Keynes has a searing portrait of Cambridge (U.K.) in the early 1950s, with economics discourse controlled by the self-styled "secret seminar" orchestrated by left-wing Keynesians led by Richard Kahn and Joan Robinson.
In a passage that now reads ironically, Johnson noted that "non-invitation to attend was deliberately used as a snub to those who lacked the correct Keynesian qualifications and/or political orientation, even though their theoretical abilities were indisputably at least equal to the group's average. "Included out" in this way were both the Cambridge economist P.T. Bauer and the American visitor Milton Friedman.
Bauer's second problem -in some ways even more serious, it may have cost him the Nobel Prize-was that he preferred words to numbers and arguments to
equations. His chosen vehicle was the essay. (His last collection, From Subsistence To Exchange, was published only in 2000.) This literary methodology has a history in economics that goes all the way back to Adam Smith. But it has been totally displaced by math, even in the freemarket catacomb.
A tribute to Bauer's work on the economics of the Third World here.
EXTRACTS from the Tribute
"For decades Lord Bauer stood alone in opposition to the view that only planning and foreign aid could produce economic development in poor third world countries... He watched marketing boards destroy a flourishing peasant agriculture keyed to exports, forcing the peasants back into subsistence farming... In theory, the marketing boards were set up to stabilize prices. In practice, the boards were used to confiscate the farmers' profits. The main result of development planning, said Bauer, was to destroy individual initiative, which is the most important factor of production... Bauer's dissent on development was based on his realization of the importance of traders in moving an economy from subsistence to exchange. This critical activity of traders was curtailed by the regulations imposed by development planning... With planning and aid came poverty and war. Foreign aid, Bauer noted, made control of the government a life-and-death matter, causing genocidal warfare between tribes. He did not spare his muddle-headed colleagues, who fervently believed they were doing good by socializing poor lands when any fool could see that not even England could afford socialism... Bauer's books on development economics are the only ones worth reading. The rest are evidence of a pathology of delusion that wrecked the lives of millions of innocent people."
REMEMBERING Peter Bauer: A Speech at the Cato Institute.
An obituary which provides an overview of the some major themes in his work.
Comments on Bauer's works up to 1991.
Extract Unfortunately, Bauer's polemical tone -- often disparaging of the achievements of Third World countries and exalting Western civilization and its benign effects on the Third World -- have not given him much of an audience in the countries where his propositions might matter most.
An accolade from one great scholar to another.
A critical review from Amartya Sen of a collection of Bauer's essays.
Tribute to Peter Bauer's work on development in the Third World.
The Milton Friedman Prize for Advancing Freedom, first awarded to
Lord Peter Bauer.
Revivalist4
Peter Bauer
