The reason for my blog pause has been a couple of days of service for the Kyiv School of Economics where I am a member of its International Advisory Board. Once a year we, along with its Board of Directors, review the development of this tender plant that has grown from the seed money and efforts of Western donors and academic economists to establish an indigenous core of trained modern economists to be a part of the needed escape from the self-inflicted backwardness still haunting the region.
Unfortunately I am cursed with Administrative Attention Deficit Disorder and cannot pay unbroken attention to any extended discussion of a spreadsheet with details of a budget. My AADD is compounded by an utter indifference to anything below the level of matters of strategy and key appointments for leadership roles. So yesterday my mind wandered off to think about Kyiv and the history of economics.
The first name that I thought of was Jacob Marschak, who has already made an appearance in Economics in the Rear-view Mirror. Actually he came into my mind as I thought about the possibility of changing the form of the Kyiv School of Economics, as an independent educational institution offering M.A. training in economics and eventually business, into a Ukrainian analogue to the Cowles Commission that was linked to the University of Chicago economics department, while it maintained a distinct identity. The reasons for that thought have less to do with grand ambition than the political realities of present-day Ukraine and evidence of donor-fatigue for its present form. Anyhow, the thought of the Cowles Commission led to me think about Jacob Marschak who was its research director during those very important years. I knew that Marschak was born in Kyiv and thought that it was important for the Kyiv School of Economics to hoist him onto its banner before some lesser institution (mis-)appropriated his name. Wandering mind and WLAN connection led to me to see that the other favorite (economics) son of Kyiv, Eugen Slutsky, was actually one of Marschak’s teachers (of statistics). OK, make room on the KSE banner for Slutsky too.
During coffee breaks, I tried to convince fellow Board members of the sheer brilliance of the idea of rebranding the Kyiv School of Economics into the Slutsky-Marschak Institute of Advanced Economics to be associated with a leading (shall remain unnamed for now) Kyiv university. It is a hard sell. I’m not done yet. Just wanted to alert visitors to this blog and potential new sponsors of an irresistable naming opportunity. Young Ukrainians want to join the global academic community. Having achieved nearly two decades of ground-breaking work to this end, the Kyiv School of Economics is a worthy target of continued international funding. Let me know if you’d like to know more about the institution, its faculty or students.