Janos Kornai: a non-mainstream pathway from economic planning to disequilibrium economics

Oldies but Goldies! Twenty Years After, the Journal of Sports Economics at a Crossroads?

“…But the convergence of Walrasian tâtonnement towards equilibrium, established by Arrow and Debreu (1954), absolutely requires that net demand curves must have an appropriate shape (identical and continuous) in order always to respond to price variations so as to narrow the gap with the equilibrium point. If demand curves may have any kind of shape, for some goods the net demand will fall with price reductions and for some other goods the net demand will raise with a price decline (Andreff, 2021a). Therefore, except when the net demand curve has an appropriate shape (a specific, not a general case), neither logical nor theoretical reason can be found for the Walrasian system of prices and quantities to converge towards equilibrium.…”

Introduction: a special issue in honoring Janos Kornai

“…It is hard to validate Keynes's influence on Kornai. Although Kornai is one of the proponents of a disequilibrium school depicting capitalist system as a 'surplus economy', he 1 3 does not accept the Keynesian notion of 'aggregate demand' (see Andreff 2020) and rejects shortage as a form of 'repressed inflation' (Kornai 1980(Kornai , 1985b. In fact, Kornai's filial relationship with the disequilibrium school is based on his adherence to the Marshallian equilibrium concept, which is consistent with a narrow range of disequilibria around a normal value (see Vahabi 1998Vahabi , 2018.…”

In Janos Kornai’s memory

“…The first subperiod covers Kornai's works from Overcentralization to Anti-Equilibrium (1971). At the start, Kornai was an advocate of market socialism; he even improved upon Oscar Lange's model in his paper with Liptak on a "Two-level Planning", published in 1965 in Econometrica (Andreff, 2021). At the end of that subperiod, Kornai became a critic of the Walrasian general equilibrium.…”