In memoriam
Three days ago I explained to you how important the work of Anthony Thirlwall had had in my journey of awareness, a work that I have tried to illustrate and share with you on several occasions . Some of my most prestigious publications, like this one , or most cited, like this one , but also, as I reminded you in the last post, of the most significant for the path we have taken are the fruit of his intellectual influence, and then of the exchange with him. done together, like this one , this one , or this one , without forgetting this one and this one (the last one linked, in particular, to the fond memory of an evening spent at dinner together in Budapest). His "law":
which I spoke to you about for the first time here , and then, in detail, three years later here , remains, from my humble point of view, a masterpiece of economy of thought. I do not know in economics, or even in the sciences of which I am an amateur, a formula which with so much conciseness (or, if you like, with so few pretensions) helps so much in interpreting a complex phenomenon (which in this case is that of growth economical). And in fact, as far as we are concerned, this simple formula, as we have seen over the long years spent together, helps us to understand how things went in Italy much better than the many sports bar explanations with which boasters of titles entertain us , or holders of very prestigious professorships: two extremes that meet in inflating them with "the train of the digital revolution", or "the poor productivity of SMEs", and similar self-racist rubbish.
The explanations of these sideshow or sideshow phenomena are not consistent with the temporal profile of the data, as I explained to you at the time . The explanation provided by Thirlwall's law, however, is.
Today, looking into the social sewer, I learned with great pain from a slightly promotional tweet by Mathias Vernengo that Tony left us at the age of 82 on November 8th. His last letter, to which I did not respond, because I was unable to find the words to do so, was from about a year ago, dated 24 November 2022. At the end of an exchange on the political situations of our respective countries, after asking me congratulations on my re-election, naturally also telling me that he would have voted for me but not for the League (a position that is evidently also represented at an international level!), Tony confided in me that he had an incurable disease, and that as much as he tried to take it stoically, his life was not easy at all.
This news left me saddened and speechless: I didn't know how to comfort him.
Then the flow of a thousand daily tasks distracted me from this thing that I would have preferred not to know. In retrospect I'm not very happy that I allowed myself to be distracted, but it happened that way and I accept the risk that it could go that way other times in the future.
I was very proud that he liked the paper in which I extended his model to a multi-country context, to analyze the contribution to a country's growth of its trade relations with different geographical areas. But all this belongs to a different time and world, the one in which I had time to study and delve deeper. I was torn from this world by having denounced, many years after him, what he, many years before, in 1998, when I had recently become familiar with his work, had called "the madness of the euro". I spoke to you about his passionate and lucid denunciation here , twelve years ago. Maybe you should reread it: it would be a useful way of remembering a person who left a trace in economic thought, reflecting on the relevance of what he tried to tell us 25 years ago.
This is a machine translation of a post (in Italian) written by Alberto Bagnai and published on Goofynomics at the URL https://goofynomics.blogspot.com/2023/11/in-memoriam.html on Sun, 19 Nov 2023 19:11:00 +0000. Some rights reserved under CC BY-NC-ND 3.0 license.