John Roemer
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John Roemer is an American economist and political scientist. He is currently the Elizabeth S. and A. Varick Stout Professor of Political Science and Economics at Yale University. Prior to joining Yale, he was on the economics faculty at the University of California, Davis, and before entering academia Roemer worked for several years as a labor organizer. He is married to Natasha Roemer and lives in New York City.
Roemer received his A.B. in mathematics summa cum laude from Harvard in 1966. He then enrolled as a graduate student in mathematics at the University of California, Berkeley, from where he was expelled for his political activism during the time of the Vietnam War. He eventually received his Ph.D. in economics from Berkeley in 1974.
[edit] Academic Contributions
Roemer is famous for his work in the fields of economic philosophy and distributive justice. In recent years he has focused his attention on the topic of equal opportunity. In his book, Equality of Opportunity, he argues that society must take the action necessary to ensure that an individual's economic (or welfare) prospects are independent of attributes such as race, gender and the economic class to which one is born. Instead, one's achieved level of welfare should depend solely on the effort that one exerts in life. In another recent monograph, Democracy, Education and Equality, Roemer claims that democracy as a political mechanism cannot guarantee, even in the long run, that an individual's prospects will be independent of the wealth or education of his/her parents, and thus we cannot rely on democracy alone for implementing the equality of opportunity concept of justice.
Previously in his career, Roemer was part of the analytical marxism school of thought, and served as one of its founders along with G.A. Cohen, Jon Elster, and others members of the September Group. His earlier books such as, Analytical Foundations of Marxian Economic Theory, A General Theory of Exploitation and Class, Value Exploitation and Class, and Free to Lose: An Introduction to Marxian Economic Philosophy, indicate his strong interest in leftist economic philsophy, and his emphasis on the importance of providing game-theoretic and microeconomic foundations for Marxist theory.
Roemer has also developed new ideas in political economy. In his book Political Competition, he argues that the traditional Downsian model of political competition in a one-dimensional policy-space is unsatisfactory because it leaves many questions inadaquately answered, such as why the poor do not expropriate the rich in democracies. In multiple dimensions, however, Nash Equilibria tend not to exist, and thus without new tools it is impossible for us to predict what policies parties will propose. Roemer offers a solution to this problem through the concept of Party-Unanimity Nash Equilibrium, or simply PUNE, in which the factions of political parties -- the militants, opportunists and reformers -- must unanimously agree to make deviations from a given policy for that policy to not be a part of the equilibrium. This kind of unanimity is often rare, and there tend to be several PUNE even when there are no regular Nash equilibria, thus creating the opposite problem of multiple equilibria. Nevertheless, the PUNE concept has proven to be very useful, and Roemer and his coauthors have used it to study problems such as voter racism and xenophobia.
