John Roemer

John E. Roemer (born February 1, 1945, in Washington, D.C., to Ruth Roemer and Milton Roemer, namesake of Roemer's law) is an American economist and political scientist.

He is the Elizabeth S. and A. Varick Stout Professor of Political Science and Economics at Yale University.

Before Yale, he was on the economics faculty at the University of California, Davis, and before entering academia Roemer worked for several years as a labor organizer.

He is married to Natasha Roemer, with whom he has two daughters.

Roemer received his A.B. in mathematics summa cum laude from Harvard in 1966.

He then enrolled as a graduate student in mathematics at the University of California, Berkeley.

He became intensely involved in the anti-Vietnam-War movement, transferred to the doctoral program in economics, and was suspended by the university for his political activities.

He taught mathematics in San Francisco secondary schools for five years.

Eventually he returned to Berkeley and received his Ph.D. in economics in 1974.

Roemer is fellow of the Econometric Society, a past Guggenheim fellow and Russell Sage fellow, a member of American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and a corresponding fellow of the British Academy.

He was past president of the Society for Social Choice and Welfare and served on the editorial boards of many journals in economics, political science, and philosophy.

Roemer served on the advisory board of Academics Stand Against Poverty (ASAP).

Roemer has contributed mainly to five areas: Marxian economics, distributive justice, political competition, equity and climate change, and the theory of cooperation.

Roemer's early work was an attempt to state the main themes of Marxian economics using the tools of general equilibrium and game theory.

Roemer's work on exploitation led him to believe that the fundamental cause of exploitation was inequality of ownership of productive assets, rather than the kind of oppression that occurs in the labor process at the point of production—the latter view was held by many in the 'New Left' (see, e.g., Braverman 1974).

He was strongly influenced by Cohen, whose work Karl Marx's Theory of History: A Defence (1978) was to become the gold standard of analytical Marxism.

Having decided that inequality of asset ownership was the key culprit in capitalist inequality, Roemer, under Cohen's influence, began reading philosophical work on equality.

Roemer joined this group in 1981.

He was impressed with Ronald Dworkin's (1981a, 1981b) writings, advocating a kind of resource egalitarianism.

In Roemer (1982), he proposed a model of agents who were differentiated by their endowments and had to choose occupations—involving either selling labor, hiring labor, or working on one's own capital stock.

In optimizing with respect to market prices, agents choose one of five class positions, each consisting of various combinations of these three activities.

This gives rise to a class structure, whose agricultural nomenclature would be landlords (who only hire labor), rich peasants (who hire labor and work themselves on their fields), middle peasants (who only work for themselves and do not participate in the labor market), poor peasants (who work on their own plot and sell labor), and landless laborers (who only sell labor).

Independently of this taxonomy, individuals are either exploiters or exploited, depending upon whether they consume goods embodying more or less labor than they expend.

The central result, the Class Exploitation Correspondence Principle (CECP), states that individuals who optimize by hiring labor are necessarily exploiters, and those who optimize by selling labor are exploited.

Thus, a classical Marxian principle, taken as an observed fact in Marx's writings, emerges here as a theorem.

Microfoundations are provided for the relationship between exploitation and class.

In simple models (e.g., that of Leontief), the definition of 'labor embodied in goods' is straightforward.

With more complicated production sets, it is not, and hence the definition of exploitation is not obvious.

Roemer's program was then to propose definitions of embodied labor time, for economies with more general production sets, which would preserve the CECP.

This led to the observation that, for general production sets, embodied labor time cannot be defined before one knows equilibrium prices.

Thus, contrary to Marx, labor value is not a concept which is more fundamental than prices.

While writing A General Theory of Exploitation and Class (1982), Roemer met the philosopher G. A. Cohen and the political theorist Jon Elster: they and others had formed a group of like-minded Marxists, young social scientists and philosophers who saw their task as reconstructing Marxism on solid analytical foundations, using modern techniques.

But in Roemer (1985), he showed that the hypothetical insurance market which Dworkin postulated to take place behind a veil of ignorance did not suffice to compensate those with a poor endowment of natural talents or bad luck in the birth lottery, as Dworkin had intended.

In fact, pathologically, Dworkin's insurance market could transfer wealth from disabled to able persons.

Influenced as well by Richard Arneson's (1989) proposal, Roemer (1993) proposed a conception of equality of opportunity, which attempted to carry out Dworkin's and Arneson's program—that is, to compensate persons for bad luck in the birth lottery, but to hold them responsible for their choices, or effort.

He expanded this theory in Roemer (1996, 1998, 2012), where he proposed an algorithm whereby a society could equalize opportunities for a given objective (wage earning capacity, income, health), consonant with its own view of what factors individuals should be held responsible for, and what factors demanded compensation.

Roemer and collaborators have produced a number of applications of this approach (Roemer et al. 2001; Llavador and Roemer 2001; Betts and Roemer 2007; Keane and Roemer 2009; Bjorkund, Jantti, and Roemer 2012).

The World Bank (2006, 2009) has employed this approach to evaluate inequality of opportunity in developing countries.

Roemer was naturally interested in the 'democratic class struggle,' that is, the manner in which classes in democracies contest their opposing interests.

He was dissatisfied with the reigning concept of political equilibrium, Hotelling-Downs equilibrium, for several reasons: first, it conceptualizes political actors as caring only about winning elections, rather than representing constituents, and second, the concept is extremely fragile, as equilibrium exists, generically, only if the policy space is uni-dimensional.