Athanasios Asimakopulos


Athanasios "Tom" Asimakopulos was a Canadian economist, who was the "William Dow Professor of Political Economy" in the Department of Economics, McGill University, Montreal, Quebec, Canada. His monograph, Keynes's General Theory and Accumulation, reviews important areas of Keynes's The [General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money|General Theory] and the theories of accumulation of two of his followers, Roy Harrod and Joan Robinson.

Biography

Asimakopulos was born in Montreal in 1930. He was educated at McGill University earning a B.A. in 1951 and an M.A. in 1953. In September 1953 Tom went to Cambridge; his research topic was a three-commodity, three-country study in international trade theory entitled Productivity Changes, the Trade Balance and the Terms of Trade. With his classmate Keith Frearson, the Australian economist, Tom went to Joan Robinson's lectures on what would become The Accumulation of Capital – Robinson's magnum opus, which sought to extend Keynes's theory to account for long-run issues of growth and capital accumulation. Initially Asimakopulos was irritated by Robinson's criticisms of the orthodox theories of value and distribution and neoclassical methodology on which he had been brought up. Asimakopulos also went regularly to research students's seminars run by Piero Sraffa, Robin Marris, and Nicholas Kaldor.
Asimakopulos was a Lecturer in Economics and Political Science from 1956 to 1957 at McGill. From 1957 to 1959 he worked as an assistant professor at the Royal Military College. In 1959 he returned to McGill and became an assistant professor, working close to J.C. Weldon. Promoted to the position of associate professor in 1963, he became a full professor in 1966. In 1988 he was appointed "William Dow Professor of Political Economy" on Weldon's vacancy. He served as Chairman of the Department of Economics from 1974 to 1978. Teaching was his top priority; Asimakopulos loved teaching the microeconomics course to the Honours Students at McGill. Even though he had an assistant, Asimakopulos made sure that, from time to time, he gave tutorials himself, on which he would emphasize, ad nauseam the importance of the assumptions of the analysis and its implications on the results of the theoretical model studied. He wrote extensively on the work of such economic theorists as J. M. Keynes, Joan Robinson, and Michał Kalecki. He was active in many professional associations and organizations. He held numerous fellowships and was a Visiting Professor and a Fellow at universities in the United States, England and Australia. From 1976 to 1990 he was a Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada.
Athanasios Asimakopulos died of leukemia in 1990.

Contributions to economic theory

Asimakopulos was a Post Keynesian / "Kaleckian" scholar, who elaborated upon Michał Kalecki's theories. Asimakopulos wrote mainly around and on Keynesian themes and on growth, distribution and technical progress. Kalecki stress nondeterminants of income distribution, determinants of economic activity, determinants of profits, long-run growth, prospects of economy, or impact of imperfect competition on growth of income has been an important inspiration to Post Keynesian economists, including Asimakopulos.
He viewed himself as a mainstream economist and declined an invitation to be included in the first edition of Philip Arestis and Malcolm Sawyer's A Biographical Dictionary of Dissenting Economists,. He was included in the second edition.

Critique of Keynes' ''Marginal Efficiency of Investment''

In his General Theory, John Maynard Keynes proposed an investment function of the sort < I = I0 + I > where the relationship between investment and interest rate was of a rather naive form. Firms were presumed to "rank" various investment projects depending on their "internal rate of return" and thereafter, faced with a given rate of interest, chose those projects whose internal rate of return exceeded the rate of interest. With an infinite number of projects available, this amounted to arguing that firms would invest until their marginal efficiency of investment was equal to the rate of interest, i.e. < MEI = r >.
Asimakopulos, Piero Garegnani and several Post Keynesians offered a critique of Keynes' original formulation. Asimakopulos et al. questioned the possibility of a downward-sloping Marginal Efficiency of Investment function in the presence of unemployment.

Major works published

Major works by Athanasios Asimakopulos :
  • Determination of Investment in Keynes's Model, The, 1971, Canadian JE
  • Finance, Saving and Investment, 1986, JPKE
  • Introduction to Economic Theory: Microeconomics, An, Oxford University Press, 1978.
  • Investment, Employment, and Income Distribution . Westview Pr, 1988.
  • Kalecki and Keynes on Finance, Investment and Saving, 1983, Cambridge JE
  • Kaleckian Theory of Income Distribution, A, 1975, Canadian JE
  • Keynes's Theory of Effective Demand Revisited, 1982, Australian EP
  • Robinsonian Growth Model in One-Sector Notation, A, 1969, Australian EP
  • Signification theorique de la Theorie generale de Keynes, La, 1987, in Boismenu and Dostaler, La Theorie generale et le keynesianisme
  • Synoptic View of Some Simple Models of Growth, A, with J.C. Weldon, 1965, Canadian JE and PS
  • Theories of Income Distribution, Kluwer Academic Pub, 1988