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Weekly UpdatesTo live in hearts we leave behind, is not to die.
Thomas Campbell
[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]
There is a loud silence with the passing of our dear friend and colleague, Clarence C. Morrison, Professor Emeritus, Indiana University at Bloomington. We at the International Atlantic Economic Society (IAES) were deeply saddened by the news and extend our deep sympathies to his wife, Geraldine (Gerry), and their children, Robert and Fred.
Clarence was a good friend and was an integral part of the IAES family since joining the Atlantic Economic Journal (AEJ) Board of Editors in 1977, a position he held until his death in August 2008. He served as the Society's Vice President in 1979-80 and as President in 1995-96. In addition, we were honored to publish several of his works in the AEJ over the course of three decades. They covered a wide variety of topics but the central theme of most of his work dealt with welfare economics and its application to general equilibrium theory.
Ralph W. (Bill) Pfouts (former IAES President) introduced Clarence when Clarence gave his IAES Vice Presidential Address in Boston in 1980. Bill was Clarence's former professor in the Ph.D. program at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and remained a mentor and friend after graduation. You can read Bill's reflections on his former student immediately following these introductory remarks. In the Boston address ("The Lerner Equal Distribution Theorem: A Possible Extension"), Clarence extended Abba Lemer's (former IAES President) equal distribution theorem to the case of ownership dispersion of monopoly firms. Under equal ignorance, ownership dispersion yielded a second-best maximum of the expected sum of satisfaction.
Likewise, in his IAES Presidential Address in Washington, D.C. in 1996 ("A Bully Pulpit"), he continued the analysis of welfare economics. In an economy with only one resource and price-making firms, virtually any price vector is a market-clearing vector if profits are distributed as dividends and consumers correctly anticipate these dividends. Always the realist, Clarence set forth a painless procedure for verifying this counterintuitive fundamental proposition. He drew upon George Stigler's 1964 Presidential Address to the AEA and integrated it with William Vickrey's 1992 IAES Presidential Address. Always the gentleman, Clarence started and finished his "homily" by saying that the International Atlantic Economic Society "has been very ... GOOD .. TO ... ME ... and also has been good to and good for the economics profession."
Other papers that we have had the privilege of publishing over a three-decade period include a second-best problem in featherbedding (1976), price searching and tatonnement in general equilibrium models (1979), Hotelling's proof and the marginal cost pricing theorem (with Pfouts, 1981), price searching in general equilibrium models (1987), welfare effects of income and excise taxes (1995), price makers and non-clearing markets (1996), and modern game theory (1998).
Clarence won the AEJ's 2003 Best Article Award for his paper entitled, "Augustin Cournot and Neoclassical Economics" (June 2003). The article compares Cournot's exposition of the elasticity of demand and the theory of the firm with modern exposition. In the case of the theory of the firm, this comparison is accomplished by translating the modern textbook exposition into Cournot's mathematics. Clarence demonstrated that Cournot's exposition translates into current usage in all cases, but that the degree of convolution in the translation process varies from case to case. For monopoly, the inverse derivative rule translates Cournot's exposition into current usage. With regard to oligopoly, Cournot provided the analytical structure that is now used in industrial organization to analyze differentiated oligopoly. This analytical structure is routinely called Bertrand competition in modern texts and literature, even though the diagram given for differentiated oligopoly is identical to Cournot's. Clarence speculated that Cournot was not given credit for game theory in price strategies because the example Cournot provided failed to gain popular attention within the profession.
His final AEJ publication appeared in the March 2008 issue, just before his death. The article examined the extent to which Jules Dupuit preceded Hotelling in the theory of marginal cost pricing and the relationship of marginal cost pricing to the Pigou-Robinson definition of exploitation, Coase's multipart pricing, and the Kaldor compensation principle.
Clarence's publications are by no means limited to the AEJ. As Richard J. Cebula, one of Clarence's former Ph.D. students points out (following Bill Pfouts' reflections), Clarence published in a wide variety of nationally and internationally recognized refereed journals. Long after his retirement from Indiana University in 1996, Clarence continued as an active scholar. Throughout his career, he published more than 60 articles, served as referee on several journals, and was a loved and admired educator and mentor.
His professional accomplishments speak for themselves. I think the best way to describe Clarence is that he was an outstanding economist who took pride in being an educator, researcher, and an intellectual sounding board. As a dedicated educator, he had a profound effect on his students (see the Cebula article). We can never measure the real extent of Clarence's impact on students over his long teaching career. If we could, it would be enormous. As a member of the AEJ Board of Editors, his reviews of manuscripts were carefully thought out, intelligent, and insightful. Just as important, each review was always kind, never sarcastic, always making prudent and helpful suggestions for the author to improve the manuscript.
But above all, his world revolved around being a loving husband to his wife, Gerry, and a loving father to their children, Bob and Fred. He loved touring the open road in his 1964 Studebaker, antique cars, and motorcycles, as well as genealogy.
A man of stature in the world of economics, Clarence Morrison will be dearly missed. Everyone who knew him had a high regard for his intellectual leadership and concern for the economic welfare of others. The IAES is proud and honored to have had Clarence's professional leadership at its helm. With his help and guidance over the years, the Society and its journals developed into a leading international forum for economists. A great and humble scholar has left our midst, but he will be dearly remembered for his contributions to the profession and to the IAES. We have been honored and enriched by the legacy Clarence Morrison has left to the profession.
On a personal level, I feel fortunate to have been able to call him a dear friend and role model. I always admired not only his contributions to our profession but also his leadership and his unending quest for truth and fairness. The profession has lost a valued colleague and the IAES has lost a warm, gentle, and close friend.
Death is part of life and now it is time to move forward. Clarence would not want it any other way. To paraphrase Thomas Campbell, "Clarence will live in the hearts he has left behind ... and his memory will not die."
John M. Virgo
Executive Vice President and Managing Editor
Clarence Morrison 1932-2008
Only the actions of the just Smell sweet and blossom in their dust.
James Shirley, The Lady of Pleasure (1635)
Clarence was a student of mine in the Graduate School at Chapel Hill. To outlive one of one's students is saddening; though not as heart rending, structurally it is similar to outliving one of one's children. The expected order of life is not realized. Instead it is reversed. Fate or, if you are a believer, Heaven has dealt you a bad, or at least strange, hand.
In the broad sense that the poet meant, Clarence was just a man and I believe his actions will continue to blossom. His work as a teacher blossoms now in the work of his students and this will continue. As a researcher his work blossoms by affecting the work of other researchers.
But Clarence was also just a man in the narrow meaning. I recall an occasion when he did not receive an award which probably should have gone to him. I sympathized with him and suggested that he has been treated unfairly.
He would not hear this. He insisted that the winner's work could be honestly judged as being as good as or even better than his own.
I miss Clarence as a friend, as a friendly critic, and as one of the just.
Ralph W. Pfouts
Professor Emeritus
University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill
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