Lerner never stayed at one institution long, serving on the faculties of nearly a dozen universities and accepting over 20 visiting appointments.[7] Lerner was 62 when he was given a professorship at theUniversity of California, Berkeley in 1965 and left after reaching mandatory retirement age six years later.[7] During his time there, Lerner criticized the unrest caused by the student protests as a threat toacademic freedom.[7]
Abba Lerner taught in the Economics Department at Florida State University, for several years. He stopped teaching after he suffered a stroke while visiting Israel.
Lerner contributed to the idea of asocial dividend by incorporating it intoOskar R. Lange's original model of socialism, where the social dividend would be distributed to each citizen as a lump-sum payment.[13]
Lerner developed the concept ofdistributive efficiency, which argued that economic equality will produce the greatest probable totalutility with a given amount of wealth.[19]
Based oneffective demand andchartalism, Lerner developedfunctional finance, a theory of purposeful financing (and funding) to meet explicit goals, includingfull employment. This is in contrast to "sound finance" principles where taxation is designed solely to fund expenditure or finance investment and low inflation.[20]
^Odekon, Mehmet (2011).Booms and Busts: An Encyclopedia of Economic History from the First Stock Market Crash of 1792 to the Current Global Economic Crisis. Armonk, NY: Sharpe.ISBN978-0765682246.
^Colander, David (December 1984), "Was Keynes a Keynesian or a Lernerian?",Journal of Economic Literature,22:1571–79, argues for the influence of Lerner's interpretation Keynes in "textbook" Keynesianism.{{citation}}: CS1 maint: postscript (link)
^Scitovsky, Tibor (1984). "Lerner's Contribution to Economics".Journal of Economic Literature.22 (4):1547–1571.JSTOR2725381.
^Abba P. Lerner, 1938. "Theory and Practice in Socialist Economics".Review of Economic Studies, 6(1), pp.71–75. • _____, 1934. "Economic Theory and Socialist Economy,"Review of Economic Studies, 2(1), pp.51–61. • _____, 1936. "A Note on Socialist Economics",Review of Economic Studies, 4(1), pp.72–76. • _____, 1937. "Statics and Dynamics in Socialist Economics,"Economic Journal, 47(186), pp.253–270. • _____, 1944,The Economics of Control, Macmillan. (J.E. Meade article book-reviewextract.)
^Tadeusz Kowalik (2008), "Lange, Oskar Ryszard (1904–1965),"The New Palgrave Dictionary of Economics, 2nd Edition.Abstract.
^Who framed 'social dividend'?, by Van Tier, Walter. March 2002. USBIG Conference, CUNY.
^"What eventually became known as textbook Keynesian policies were in many ways Lerner's interpretations of Keynes's policies, especially those expounded inThe Economics of Control (1944) and later inThe Economics of Employment (1951)...Textbook expositions of Keynesian policy naturally gravitated to the black and white 'Lernerian' policy ofFunctional Finance rather than the grayer Keynesian policies. Thus, the vision that monetary and fiscal policy should be used as a balance wheel, which forms a key element in the textbook policy revolution, deserves to be called Lernerian rather than Keynesian." (Colander 1984, p. 1573)
^Abba P. Lerner, 1936. "The Symmetry Between Import and Export Taxes",Economica, N.S., 3(11), pp.306–313.
