Michio Morishima 101: Japanese Heterodox Economist

Michio Morishima 101: Who is the Japanese Heterodox Economist? In our article of Zatrun.com, we will cover in detail everything you need to know about the Japanese heterodox economist and public intellectual Michio Morishima, who our readers are curious about.

Who is Michio Morishima?

Michio Morishima (1923-2004) was a Japanese economist who became known as a heterodox scholar and public intellectual. He held the Sir John Hicks Professorship of Economics at the London School of Economics from 1970 to 1988. He was also a professor at Osaka University and a member of the British Academy.

In 1976, He was awarded the prestigious Order of Culture (文化勲章, Bunka-kunshō) in Japan. Morishima initially aspired to become a historical novelist but pursued an academic path by studying economics and sociology under Yasuma Takada at university. He received extensive training in both mainstream neoclassical economic theory and Marxist economics at Kyoto University.

Michio Morishima graduated from Kyoto University in 1946 and became known for his strong mathematical skills. and went on to become a professor at Osaka University. On December 25, 2022, he collaborated with Yasuma Takada to establish the Institute for Social and Economic Research (ISER) at Osaka University, which is archived on the Wayback Machine site.

His Career Life

Nobel laureate Lawrence R from the University of Pennsylvania in 1960. Together with Klein, he founded the International Economic Review, which has become one of the world’s leading economic journals (currently published by Penn). in 1965, he became the first Japanese president of the Econometric Society. John Hicks was a staunch defender of Morishima’s career in England.

he emigrated to England in 1968, taught at the University of Essex, and then accepted a chair at the LSE in 1970. Later, he attended the Suntory-Toyota Centers for International Economics and Related Disciplines at the LSE (STICERD, supported by the Suntory-Toyota Foundation). He served as the first director of STICERD. he was elected an Honorary Fellow of the LSE in 1991.

His Contributions in the Field of Economics

Michio Morishima’s three-volume work, which reinterprets and synthesizes economic ideas from the important writings of David Ricardo, Karl Marx, and Léon Walras, has been largely forgotten. But it represents one of the culmination points of the radical economic policy of the New Left in North America in the 1970s.

His intense interest in general equilibrium theory, classical political economy and capitalism guided this work, which was based on his LSE lectures and tried to adapt von Neumann’s 1937 model of multi-sectoral growth into a general equilibrium model. Given that the work of these theorists was Decently Ricardian in nature, the three books attempted to illuminate the theoretical similarities and differences between their positions in von Neumann’s line of thought.