A few months ago, I posted here inquiring whatever happened to him. He's dead. ----------------------------- http://www.nytimes.com/2016/03/30/business/economy/lester-c-thurow-prominent-economist-is-dead-at-77.html
Lester C. Thurow, a prominent and provocative economist who earned a dedicated following through his long writing and speaking career, and who was known for his prescient warnings about the growing income gap between rich and poor Americans, died on Friday in Westport, Mass. He was 77.
His wife, Anna, confirmed his death.
Mr. Thurow was a prolific author and took to television and the lecture circuit with gusto, paying special attention to the income gap and globalization, which he contended would have a deleterious impact on American labor. He also taught at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology for decades.
In his writing, he tried to make the dry and difficult-to-grasp intricacies of the American economy accessible to a mass audience.
Mr. Thurow said that he decided to devote himself to communicating about economics after he was not offered a job in President Jimmy Carter’s administration, although he had been an economic adviser to Mr. Carter’s campaign.
“I decided that if I could not have the king’s ear, I would talk to the public,” he said in a 1997 interview. “That’s the other way to have an impact on the economic system.”
He was the dean of the M.I.T. Sloan School of Management from 1987 to 1993 and a founder of the Economic Policy Institute, an influential progressive research group. In his heyday, he charged speaking fees of $30,000 and was one of the most sought-after economists on the lecture circuit.
Mr. Thurow was often prone to sweeping declarations about the economy, using metaphors and easily digestible analyses to convey his point. That made him a target of criticism from other economists, notably Paul Krugman, who is now a New York Times columnist, who argued that much of what he said was overly simplistic.
“He was prone to simplifications more than grandeur — a strength as well as a weakness,” said Richard Schmalensee, a colleague and professor at M.I.T.
Some of Mr. Thurow’s bolder predictions — for example, that Japan would emerge as a titanic trading power that would not just rival but overwhelm the United States and Europe in the global economy — never materialized.
Still, his impact among fellow economists and his influence on how they disseminated their work were significant.
“Lester used both print and TV more than anyone of his generation,” said Thomas A. Kochan, a professor at M.I.T. who worked with Mr. Thurow for many years. “And he did it more skillfully than anyone else.”
Lester Carl Thurow was born in Livingston, Mont., on May 7, 1938, a son of Willis Carl Thurow, a Methodist minister, and Alice Thickman Thurow, a math teacher.
He received a bachelor’s degree in political economy from Williams College and earned a master’s in philosophy, politics and economics from Balliol College of Oxford University on a Rhodes Scholarship. He received a Ph.D. in economics from Harvard in 1964 and, by the time he was 30, was a professor at M.I.T.
After he turned to writing books, he appeared often on PBS and wrote extensively for The New York Times and Newsweek. He wrote several books, including “The Zero-Sum Society” (1980) and “The Future of Capitalism” (1996).
And he tackled the income gap before it was widely discussed.
“He was one of the first important economists to suggest that too much inequality is bad for society,” said Jared Bernstein, a senior fellow at the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities. “And he was writing this just as the inequality trend that is so historically high right now was taking off. While people like myself were just beginning to see it in the data, he was already warning about its implications for society.”
Besides his wife, Mr. Thurow is survived by two sons, Torben and Ethan; two stepchildren, Yaron and Yael; a brother, Chuck; and seven grandchildren.
Mr. Thurow was also an avid mountain climber. Mr. Kochan of M.I.T. recalled that in the 1980s Mr. Thurow was determined to climb a mountain in Nepal. His colleague was skeptical about the idea: It was risky, and it would require time off from work.
“I remember asking him, ‘Why in the world are you doing that?’” Mr. Kochan said. “And he said, ‘If I don’t do it before I’m 50, I’ll never be able to do it.’ He worked like a devil to get himself into the shape to do it, and then he went off and did it. That was Lester.
“Once he was fixed on a point, he worked his world around it. That’s the way his mind worked, and the way his economic writing worked.”
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