Gerald W. Scully, a first-rate economist, has died of pancreatic cancer. Jerry authored the article on sports in The Concise Encyclopedia of Economics.
Although I chose him as the author and edited his piece, I never met Jerry. But economist John Goodman, the head of the National Center for Policy Analysis, knew him well and has a short write-up at his blog.
Two highlights from Goodman’s blog:
Jerry was one of the most prolific, innovative and imaginative economists of our age. One of the most fundamental building blocks of economics is the idea of “marginal product.” Jerry was the first economist to ever measure one. He did it in, of all places, baseball.
He pioneered sports economics and went on to make many contributions in other fields. One of his most important contributions was the “Scully Curve.” Jerry showed that the size of government can contribute to economic growth in a nation’s early stages, but at some point, the size of government becomes a burden – reducing the rate of growth and causing national income to be lower than it otherwise would be.
READER COMMENTS
Asif Dowla
May 7 2009 at 3:46pm
I was a RA for Jerry. I am sorry to hear about his untimely death. He was an interesting character. He loved collecting rugs made by ethnic groups all over the world. He told me, three kinds of people can get an A in his class: God, Milton Friedman and himself.
He loved smoking Camel cigarettes and used colorful languages.
RIP my friend Jerry
David R. Henderson
May 8 2009 at 10:21am
Thanks, Asif.
If you want to see some nice tributes by some of the heavy hitters, tributes that tell you more about the man, go to the John Goodman blog that I’ve linked in the post. One thing I hadn’t known about was how regression results led him to his pro-market views. In my experience, that’s pretty rare.
Comments are closed.