Just received from Radhika Balakrishnan and Will Milberg.
L

We mourn the loss of our dear friend and mentor Nina Shapiro,  
Professor of Economics at St. Peter’s College and a major contributor  
to the field of post-Keynesian economics since the 1970s. Nina passed  
away last week at the age of 69 from complications due to cancer.  She  
is survived by her husband Richard Garrett, retired Professor of  
Economics, Marymount Manhattan College and daughter Emma Garrett at  
the University of Michigan, Dearborn.

Nina wrote about the history of economic thought, the theory of the  
firm and innovation, and about macroeconomic theory. Her work was  
rooted in the tradition of Marx, Keynes, Kalecki and Steindl.  She was  
a deeply creative thinker who connected Marxian and Marshallian ideas  
on competition with the macroeconomics of Keynes and Steindl.  An  
essay published at the start of her career, “The Revolutionary  
Character of Post Keynesian Economics” (Journal of Economic  
Literature, 1977) made an enduring case for the rejection of scarcity  
as the basis for economic analysis.  She published regularly in The  
Journal of Post-Keynesian Economics and at the time of her death was  
at work on a book on the theory of the firm.

Nina received her doctorate at The New School for Social Research in  
New York City and became an integral part of the post-Keynesian and  
Marxian Economics Department at Rutgers University in the late 1970s  
and 1980s, which included Paul Davidson, Alfred Eichner, Jan Kregel,  
Lourdes Beneria, Michele Naples and others.  She was a unique  
intellectual in her ability to identify the instability of capitalism  
with its underlying logic of competition and to embed that in a deep  
philosophical sense of the meaning of economic life.  She was one of  
very few women in the field of Post Keynesian economics.  A brilliant  
teacher of the history of economic thought and heterodox  
microeconomics, Nina mentored two generations of economists, including  
the two of us.  A memorial service will be held in May and we will  
send details when they are available.

Radhika Balakrishnan, Rutgers University
Will Milberg, The New School for Social Research