Jacob Viner

Viner was an international trade theorist in his own right. His book The Customs Union Issue introduced the distinction between the trade-creating and the trade-diverting effects of customs unions (see Free Trade Agreements and Customs Unions). His earliest book, Dumping, was a comprehensive analysis of the subject.

Viner was known for his view that the long run mattered. Some of his best articles are reprinted in a 1958 book, The Long View and the Short. Viner wrote: "No matter how refined and how elaborate the analysis, if it rests solely on the short view it will still be... a structure built on shifting sands." One of the articles published in this book, "Cost Curves and Supply Curves," laid out the short-run and long-run cost curves that still show up in microeconomics texts.

Viner, who grew up in Montreal, was an undergraduate student at McGill University, where he studied economics under famous Canadian humorist Stephen Leacock. He earned his Ph.D. at Harvard, writing his dissertation under international trade economist Frank W. Taussig. He was a professor at the University of Chicago from 1916 to 1917 and from 1919 until 1946. He moved to Princeton in 1946, where he taught until retiring in 1960. For many of his years at Chicago, Viner, along with Frank Knight, edited the Journal of Political Economy. Viner is not considered part of the Chicago school as he was much less sympathetic to free markets than his Chicago school colleagues.