Profile Major Works Resources

János Kornai, 1928-

Hungarian planning economist.  Between the 1960s and 1980s, János Kornai was perhaps one of the best-known economists of the Eastern bloc.

János Kornai (born János Kornahuser) was the son of a well-to-do Hungarian bourgeois family, whose destiny got derailed during the Nazi occupation of Hungary.  Kornai's family was interned in a camp for a period (his father shipped off to slave labor, later to be killed at Auschwitz).  Kornai's sympathies turned naturally towards his Soviet liberators, and he resolved to learn more about Marxism, and set about studying it on his own.  Finding Marx an eye-opener,  Kornai joined the Hungarian Communist Party and became a vigorous activist.  For a decade after the war, Kornai worked as an economic columnist for the party newspaper, Szabad Nep.

In 1955,  his faith shaken by some of the grimmer realities of communist Hungary, Janos Kornai left the newspaper and enrolled in the Institute of Economics at the Hungarian Academy of Science in Budapest.  He would remain associated with this institution for decades, as teacher, researcher and eventually, from 1967, director.

Kornai's 1957 thesis was one of the first books detailing the problems of socialist central planning.  Kornai helped introduce modern mathematical programming methods in socialist planning in the 1960s, most famously the "two-level" planning (Kornai-Liptak), decomposing a large linear programming problem into sub-problems. Kornai was also an early promoter of the introduction of decentralization and the use of market forces in socialist economies.   Kornai 1980 book was a a widely-read expose of the chronic difficulties and perverse results of central planning. 

Kornai also dabbled in methodology and philosophy, providing a critique of Walrasian general equilibrium theory (1971) and a searching evaluation and critique of the socialist experiment (1992).

From 1986, Kornai was appointed as professor of economics at Harvard, a position he held jointly with his position in Budapest.   In the post-communist era, Kornai transitioned into a specialist on post-socialist transition economies.

 

  

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Major Works of Janos Kornai

  • Overcentralization in Economic Administration, 1957 [English trans. 1959]
  • "Two-Level Planning", with T. Liptak, 1962, Econometrica
  • Mathematical Planning in Structural Decisions, 1965 [English trans. 1967]
  • "Multi-level programming - a first report on the model and experimental computations", 1969, European ER
  • Anti-Equilibrium, 1971
  • Rush vs. Harmonic Growth, 1972
  • "The normal state of the market in a shortage economy: the queue model", with J.W. Weibull, 1978, Scandinavian JE
  • "Resource-constrained versus demand-constrained systems", 1979, Econometrica
  • "The dilemmas of a socialist economy: the Hungarian experience:, 1980, Cambridge JE
  • Economics of Shortage, 1980
  • The Road to a Free Economy, 1989 [English trans. 1990]
  • The Socialist System. The Political Economy of Communism, 1992
  • Highway and Byways, 1995
  • Struggle and Hope, 1997
  • Welfare in Transition, with K. Eggleston, 2001
  • By Force of Thought: an intellectual journey, 2007

 
HET

 
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Resources on Janos Kornai

  • Janos Kornai page at Harvard
  • "Janos Kornai and Marxism" article at Hungarian spectrum blog
  • "We’re All Austrians Now: János Kornai and the Austrian School of Economics" by Peter Leeson, 2007 [pdf]
  • Wikipedia

 

 
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