Kazimierz Łaski

Kazimierz Łaski (December 15, 1921 – October 20, 2015) was a Polish-Austrian economist. During the antisemitic purge of 1968 Łaski had to leave Poland and moved to Austria, where he worked for the rest of his life and was widely recognized as a major contributor to Post-Keynesian economics.

Life and career

Kazimierz Łaski was born as Hendel Cygler in Częstochowa, Poland. As a Jew in Nazi-occupied Poland, in 1943 he obtained identity documents with a Polish name that he later kept. Łaski was a consistent supporter of state interventionism in economy for the sake of maintaining full employment and moderating income differentiation, which in turn he saw as necessary to prevent the recurrent in capitalism extremes of economic cycles.

After the 2008 financial crisis, Kazimierz Łaski was quick to take advantage of the signs of a comeback of interest in Kalecki's ideas in the West and he brought the issue to Poland. Łaski enjoyed renewed attention among the younger generation of Polish economists and activists. Invited by institutions and associations, including the Institute of Advanced Studies of the leftist think tank Krytyka Polityczna, he visited Poland regularly. Despite his advanced age, Łaski remained professionally active and he took it upon himself to dispute the dominant neoliberal dogma in Poland. Together with the economist and politician Jerzy Osiatyński, they conducted economic seminars at the Institute in 2013–15, in which prominent foreign economists participated. The 2015 book, Wykłady z makroekonomii. Gospodarka kapitalistyczna bez bezrobocia [Lectures on macroeconomics: capitalist economy without unemployment], is the fruit of the last years of Łaski's life. The textbook presents updated versions of the fundamental theories of John Maynard Keynes and Michał Kalecki.

Selected publications

From Marx to the Market: Socialism in Search for an Economic System (with Wlodzimierz Brus), Oxford University Press, Oxford, 1989 An Alternative Economic Policy for Central and Eastern Europe, in: Mark Knell (ed), Economics of Transition. Structural Adjustments and Growth Prospects in Eastern Europe, Edward Elgar, Cheltenham, UK and Brookfield, Vermont, US, 1996, pp. 87–115 Lessons to be drawn from main mistakes in the transition strategy (with Amit Bhaduri), in: Salvatore Zecchini (ed), Lessons from the Economic Transition. Central and Eastern Europe in the 1990s, OECD, Kluwer Academic Publishers, 1997 Three Ways to High ... Unemployment, wiiw Working Papers, No. 12, Vienna, January 2000 Effective Demand versus Profit Maximization in Aggregate Demand/Supply Analysis: A Dynamic Perspective (with Amit Bhaduri and Martin Riese), Banca Nazionale del Lavoro Quarterly Review 210 (2001), pp. 281–93. Growth and Savings in USA and Japan (with Roman Römisch), wiiw Working Papers, No. 16, Vienna, July 2001 Mity i rzeczywistość w polityce gospodarczej i w nauczaniu ekonomii (Myths and reality in economic policy and teaching), INE PAN i Fundacja Innowacja, Warszawa, 2009 The basic paradigms of the EU economic policy-making need to be changed (with Leon Podkaminer), Cambridge Journal of Economics, February 2012 Wykłady z makroekonomii. Gospodarka kapitalistyczna bez bezrobocia (Lectures on macroeconomics: capitalist economy without unemployment), Polskie Towarzystwo Ekonomiczne, Warszawa 2015

Literature Fink, G., G. Pöll and M. Riese (ed.): Foreword, in: Economic Theory, Political Power and Social Justice – Festschrift Kazimierz Laski, Linzer Universitätsschriften, 7, Springer-Verlag, Wien, 1987 "Ehrung für Wirtschaftskoryphäe" Oberösterreichische Nachrichten, 28. Jänner 2012