Calestous Juma, guest blogger
World renowned development economist Alice Amsden passed away this week.
It is with great sadness that I learned of the passing of Professor Alice Amsden. Alice was a true intellectual force and made remarkable contributions to our understanding of emerging economies.
She was widely recognized as one of the world’s leading visionaries. In 2003 she was awarded the Leontief Prize for Advancing the Frontiers of Economic Thought from GDAE at Tufts University. The prize recognizes scholars whose work has helped to broaden economics to better understand urgent contemporary issues. She has made important contributions to our understanding of the role of building productive capabilities as a foundation for innovation.
A few of us who came to work with her closely also knew her as a person of irrepressible character who maintained very high standards. She challenged herself as hard as she challenged others. She pursued her research with remarkable vigor.
I have known Alice for nearly a decade. Over the period she was a member of the faculty of Harvard Kennedy School’s executive program on “Innovation for Economic Development” that I chair.
Alice’s impatience with neo-classical economics is well-known. She was one of the first economists to challenge the belief in free markets. Her works such as Asia’s Next Giant and The Rise of ‘the Rest” have become classics. What is little-known, however, is her dedication to institution-building. We worked together to help several countries build new research institutions from the ground up. One of the greatest successes among our efforts was helping Oman create its National Research Council.
As part of our collaboration Alice invited me to serve with her on several MIT doctoral committees. Alice always wanted to be sure that her students produced the most rigorous work that was worthy of her time. In return, she was highly supportive of her students and prepared them well for the challenges of the academic world.
Alice possessed remarkable curiosity and used every opportunity to challenge and advance her own thinking. I recall that in one of our executive sessions Alice was challenged to explain the differences between Asian and Latin American countries. What started as a hypothetical answer led to a major research effort on the idea of “role models” in economic transformation. Alice developed this idea into a book manuscript.
Her curiosity was matched by her sense humor, which she often rendered with remarkable courage. She had a special way of breaking the ice. On our trip to Oman Alice looked straight at our principal host and asked: “How many wives do you have and why?” The question elicited a very respectful answer and a rich conversation on cultural differences.
Alice did not care much about tradition and was true rebel. I recall once inviting her to give a talk at the Harvard Kennedy School. I also invited someone else to lead the discussion by commenting on her work. Alice started her presentation by challenging the writings of the commentator. The rest of the seminar did not go as planned, obviously.
Alice cared deeply for humanity and had remarkable empathy for the oppressed and disadvantaged. It was really her strong sense of justice that led her to do her doctoral work in post-independence Kenya and Asian countries in her later work.
Alice was more than a colleague and mentor. She was a family friend with whom we would spend part of each summer. Those moments gave us a glimpse into her humanity and a joyful part of her that we will sorely miss.
Alice will be remembered for her genuine and untiring dedication to human improvement. She was a true force for good and has left an indelible mark on our intellectual terrain. She was way ahead of her time and it is only now that the world is catching up with her thinking. It is so sad that she will not be around to see her vision start to come true.
Calestous Juma is Professor of the Practice of International Development at the John F. Kennedy School of Government and Director of the Science, Technology, and Globalization Project at the Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs at Harvard University.
This is a sad day indeed, for all the reasons Kevin Gallagher and Calestous Juma outline. She was one-of-a-kind. As Calestous notes, it is a shame that she will not get to see the seeds she sowed begin to bear fruit. But she already did, and you know that with her keen sense of economic history she saw clearly the opening that she helped create. And her work will live on, as well, through the contributions of her many talented and dedicated students.
It is with great sadness, both professional and personal, that I learnt about Alice’s death through a mutual friend and former colleague, Gabrielle Koehler. I was her host at UN-ESCAP, Bangkok, when she visited us in her sabbatical year in 1989 for a short visit as a Consultant on the restructuring of Asian Economies. Her seminal work on South Korea: the Next Asian Giant, had already made her famous, but in the the next two decades she established her as one of the world’s leading development economist. I rooted for her to get the Nobel and wrote to her in early October, 2010, to be prepared for an early morning call from Stockholm soon. But she was ignored, as was Joan Robinson three decades earlier, for almost identical reasons. Not that she cared a bit about such things.Personally, she was a most pleasant and lively person and I enjoyed every bit of her two month stay in Bangkok. I dearly regret not meeting her in Cambridge, despite her generous invitations. I am sure her work in development economics will be a great source of inspiration to future generation of economists.
[…] firmly part of the heterodox economic tradition populated by development economist Alice Amsden, who sadly died last week just as her ideas are regaining […]
[…] two people are much better at writing legit memorial pieces than me. I’ll just miss her a lot. […]
Remembering Alice in Taiwan
It is hard to believe that Alice has passed away. The last e-mail I received from her was sent on March 5th. She wanted me to comment on a paragraph she just revised in her book manuscript. Before that we were discussing branding, whether the US is more brand-intensive than Europe. Actually, Alice had been busy revising her manuscript, and we had numerous exchanges on that. She always loved to work, all the more so to forget her illness after she became unwell in recent years. Despite her health problems, her book manuscript is full of innovative ideas. I do sincerely hope her manuscript would get published soon, otherwise it would be a great loss to the world.
I did not know her passing away till late. One day, I read in the New York Times that there is a new book out, and its subtitle includes a term “the rising rest”. So I wrote to Alice to tell her that the term she coined has now been widely used. After getting no reply from her, I checked and found out that she is no longer with us. Such a shock. Though I know she had been fighting with this unknown illness, we always thought she would recover to her old self again. She seemed to have more energy than the rest of us combined.
While co-writing our book together (Beyond Late Development, 2003), I learned a lot from her. Actually, I had always looked up to her as a model development economist in the heterodox tradition. After knowing her personally, the thing I appreciate most in her is that she really wished to help latecomers (or “the rest”) to develop economically, because she knew that development is the only way to “to escape from the empire”. She has devoted her life to this end. As a rebel of the empire, she is a true friend of the latecomers. She will be sorely missed. Her work will continue to be relevant.