Vela Velupillai
Encyclopedia
Kumaraswamy Velupillai (born 1947 Colombo, Sri Lanka) is an academic economist.
He is a Professor of Economics - 'Professore di Chiara Fama' - in the department of economics at the University of Trento
, Italy. Till recently he was the John E. Cairnes Professor of Economics at the National University of Ireland, Galway
and a Fellow of Girton College, Cambridge. He is concurrently a standing Senior Visiting Professor at the Madras School of Economics
, Chennai, India.
and the History
and Philosophy of Economics
. Within Computable Economics, his major focus has been an attempt to mathematize economic theory - both micro and macro theory - using the methods of recursion theory
and constructive mathematics.
. He obtained his undergraduate degree from the Faculty of Engineering at Kyoto University
, Kyoto, Japan; he obtained a Master's degree in economics at the Department of Economics, University of Lund, Lund, Sweden and a PhD in economics at Cambridge University (King's College). His PhD supervisor, initially, was Lord Kaldor
and, subsequently, and decisively, Richard Goodwin
.
A Festschrift in Vela Velupillai's honour, Computable, Constructive and Behavioural Economic Dynamics, edited by Stefano Zambelli, was recently published by Routledge.
Other influences but with less personal connection: Gunnar Myrdal
, John Hicks
and Nicholas Georgescu-Roegen
.
He is a Professor of Economics - 'Professore di Chiara Fama' - in the department of economics at the University of Trento
University of Trento
The University of Trento is an Italian university located in the cities of Trento and Rovereto. It has been able to achieve considerable results in didactics, research and international relations, as shown by Censis University Guide and by the Italian Ministry of...
, Italy. Till recently he was the John E. Cairnes Professor of Economics at the National University of Ireland, Galway
National University of Ireland, Galway
The National University of Ireland, Galway is a constituent university of the National University of Ireland...
and a Fellow of Girton College, Cambridge. He is concurrently a standing Senior Visiting Professor at the Madras School of Economics
Madras School of Economics
The Madras School of Economics is an institution of higher education in economics, located in Chennai, India. Affiliated with Anna University, it offers master's and doctoral programs in economics and financial economics....
, Chennai, India.
Current work
His current work is almost entirely devoted to Computable Economics, Macroeconomic TheoryMacroeconomics
Macroeconomics is a branch of economics dealing with the performance, structure, behavior, and decision-making of the whole economy. This includes a national, regional, or global economy...
and the History
History of economic thought
The history of economic thought deals with different thinkers and theories in the subject that became political economy and economics from the ancient world to the present day...
and Philosophy of Economics
Economic methodology
Economic methodology is the study of methods, especially the scientific method, in relation to economics, including principles underlying economic reasoning...
. Within Computable Economics, his major focus has been an attempt to mathematize economic theory - both micro and macro theory - using the methods of recursion theory
Recursion theory
Computability theory, also called recursion theory, is a branch of mathematical logic that originated in the 1930s with the study of computable functions and Turing degrees. The field has grown to include the study of generalized computability and definability...
and constructive mathematics.
Education
His high school education was at Royal College ColomboRoyal College Colombo
The Royal College of Colombo was founded in January 1835 in Colombo. It is considered to be the leading Public School in Sri Lanka...
. He obtained his undergraduate degree from the Faculty of Engineering at Kyoto University
Kyoto University
, or is a national university located in Kyoto, Japan. It is the second oldest Japanese university, and formerly one of Japan's Imperial Universities.- History :...
, Kyoto, Japan; he obtained a Master's degree in economics at the Department of Economics, University of Lund, Lund, Sweden and a PhD in economics at Cambridge University (King's College). His PhD supervisor, initially, was Lord Kaldor
Nicholas Kaldor
Nicholas Kaldor, Baron Kaldor was one of the foremost Cambridge economists in the post-war period...
and, subsequently, and decisively, Richard Goodwin
Richard M. Goodwin
Richard M. Goodwin was an American mathematician and economist. He was born in Indiana.Goodwin received his BA and PhD at Harvard, and he taught there from 1942 until 1950. He taught at the University of Cambridge until 1979 and the University of Siena until 1984.Goodwin worked on the interaction...
.
Academic posts
He has held tenured and visiting appointments at the European University Institute, Fiesole, Italy, UCLA, the People's University in Beijing and several other European Universities and Research Institutions. He is the founder of the Algorithmic Social Sciences Research Unit at the University of Trento.A Festschrift in Vela Velupillai's honour, Computable, Constructive and Behavioural Economic Dynamics, edited by Stefano Zambelli, was recently published by Routledge.
Influences
He lists, in an autobiographical statement, the Economists he has met and who have influenced him in particular ways. They include the following:- Björn Thalberg: The Oslo traditions of Ragnar Frisch and Trygve Haavelmo
- Nicholas KaldorNicholas KaldorNicholas Kaldor, Baron Kaldor was one of the foremost Cambridge economists in the post-war period...
, Piero SraffaPiero SraffaPiero Sraffa was an influential Italian economist whose book Production of Commodities by Means of Commodities is taken as founding the Neo-Ricardian school of Economics.- Early life :...
, Geoff HarcourtGeoff HarcourtGeoffrey Colin Harcourt is an Australian academic economist who studied at the University of Melbourne and then at the King's College, Cambridge.-Biography:...
and, in particular, Richard GoodwinRichard GoodwinRichard Goodwin may refer to:*Richard N. Goodwin , American writer and advisor to US Presidents Kennedy and Johnson*Richard M. Goodwin , American mathematician and economist*Richard Elton Goodwin , British Army General...
: Cambridge iconoclasm
- Robert Clower, John McCall, and Dick Day: Critical traditions of American Macroeconomics
- Lance Taylor: Development Economics
- Herbert SimonHerbert SimonHerbert Alexander Simon was an American political scientist, economist, sociologist, and psychologist, and professor—most notably at Carnegie Mellon University—whose research ranged across the fields of cognitive psychology, cognitive science, computer science, public administration, economics,...
: who commented favourably on Velupillai's Computable Economics.
- Tony Lawson: Economic Methodology
Other influences but with less personal connection: Gunnar Myrdal
Gunnar Myrdal
Karl Gunnar Myrdal was a Swedish Nobel Laureate economist, sociologist, and politician. In 1974, he received the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences with Friedrich Hayek for "their pioneering work in the theory of money and economic fluctuations and for their penetrating analysis of the...
, John Hicks
John Hicks
Sir John Richard Hicks was a British economist and one of the most important and influential economists of the twentieth century. The most familiar of his many contributions in the field of economics were his statement of consumer demand theory in microeconomics, and the IS/LM model , which...
and Nicholas Georgescu-Roegen
Nicholas Georgescu-Roegen
Nicholas Georgescu-Roegen, born Nicolae Georgescu was a Romanian mathematician, statistician and economist, best known for his 1971 magnum opus The Entropy Law and the Economic Process, which situated the view that the second law of thermodynamics, i.e., that usable "free energy" tends to disperse...
.
Key books
- Nonlinear and Mutisectoral Macrodynamics: Essays in Honour of Richard Goodwin. (edited) Macmillan, London, 1989.
- Computable Economics (The Fourth Arne Ryde Lectures) Oxford University Press, January, 2000.
- Computable Foundations for Economics, Routledge, February, 2010.
- The International Library of Critical Writings in Economics: The Elgar Companion to Computable Economics, Editor (with the assistance of: Stephen Kinsella & Stefano Zambelli, Edward Elgar, Cheltenham, November, 2011
Main articles
- "Irving Fisher on `Switches of Techniques´: A Historical Note", Quarterly Journal of Economics, Vol. LXXXIX, No. 4, November, pp. 679–680, 1975.
- "Rationality, Computability and Complexity", (with B. Rustem), Journal of Economic Dynamics and Control, Vol. 14, No. 2, May, pp. 419–432, 1990.
- “The Vintage Economist”, The Journal of Economic Behaviour and Organisation, Vol.37, No.1, Sep., pp. 1–31, 1998.
- “Richard Goodwin: 1913-1996”, The Economic Journal, Vol. 108, September, 1998, pp. 1436–1449.
- “Effectivity and Constructivity in Economic Theory”, The Journal of Economic Behavior and Organization, Vol.49, Issue, 3, pp. 307–325, November, 2002.
- “A Disequilibrium Macrodynamic Model of Fluctuations”, Journal of Macroeconomics, Vol. 28, Issue 4, December, pp. 752–767, 2006.
- “Japanese Contributions to Non-Linear Cycle Theory in the 1950s”, Japanese Economic Review, Vol. 59, No. 1, March, pp. 54–74, 2008.
- “Sraffa’s Constructive Mathematical Economics”, Journal of Economic Methodology, Vol. 15, No.4, December, pp. 325–348, 2008.
- “The Mathematization of Macroeconomics”, Economia Politica [Journal of Analytical and Institutional Economics], Vol. XXV, Issue 3, August, pp. 283–316, 2008.
- “Uncomputability and Undecidability in Economic Theory”, Applied Mathematics and Computation, Vol. 215, Issue 4, 15 October, pp. 1404–1416, 2009.
- "In Praise of Fostering Anarchy in Research and Teaching", Economic and Political Weekly, vol XIV, no.14, April 3, 2010.
- "Development Economics without Growth Theory", Economia Politica[Journal of Analytical and Institutional Economics], Vol.XXVII, Issue 1,9-54, 2010.
- "Foundations of Boundedly Rational Choice and Satisficing Decisions", Advances in Decision Sciences, April, 2010.
- "Towards an Algorithmic Revolution in Economic Theory",The Journal of Economic Surveys, Vol.XXV, no.3,401-430, 2011.
International Awards, Fellowships, Memberships & Prizes
- Elected as a Distinguished Visiting Scholar, University of Technology, Sydney (UTS), Sydney, Australia, 2011/12.
- Elected Member, Turing Centenary Advisory Committee (TCAC), December, 2010
- Elected to give the Herbert Simon Lectures at the National Chengchi University, Taipei, Taiwan, March, 2010.
- Elected to give the Krishna Bharadwaj Lecture, Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi, India, March, 2010.
- Elected Foreign Member, Moral Sciences Division of the Juridical, Political and Economic Sciences, Istituto Lombardo, Italy, July, 2010.
- Awarded the ‘2009 Nord-Sud Fondazione Pescarabbruzzo Prize’ for the Social Sciences, Fondazione Pescarabbruzzo, Pescara, Italy, October, 2009.
- Elected Foreign Corresponding Member of the Brazilian Academy of Philosophy, 17 April, 2006.
- Elected to give the Laudatio Lecture in Honour of Richard Day, Max Planck Institute, Jena, May, 2008.
- Elected to a Visiting Fellowship, Peterhouse, CambridgePeterhouse, CambridgePeterhouse is a constituent college of the University of Cambridge, England. It is the oldest college of the University, having been founded in 1284 by Hugo de Balsham, Bishop of Ely...
, 2001.
- Honorary Professor, Queen’s University of Belfast, Belfast, UK, 1998-2003.
- Standing Senior Visiting Professor, Madras School of Economics, Chennai, India,1998 --.
- Distinguished Invited Lecturer, Central Bank of Uruguay, Montevideo, Uruguay,1998.
- Elected to give the Arne Ryde Lectures, University of Lund, Sweden, 1994.
- US National Science Foundation/Ford Foundation Visiting Professorship at the People’s University, Beijing, China, 1988.
- C.O.R.E, Research Fellowship, Université catholique de Louvain, Louvain-La-Neuve, Belgium, 1977/78.
Distinguished Students
- Stefano Zambelli
- Shu-Heng ChenShu-Heng ChenProf. Dr. Shu-Heng Chen is a Distinguished Professor in the Department of Economics at National Chengchi University, where he is also Dean of Office of International Cooperation, Director of the AI-ECON Research Center and the organizer of the Experimental Economics Laboratory at National Chengchi...
- Francesco Luna
- Serena Sordi
- Stephen Kinsella