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4/21/08

Jeffrey Young Named Piskor Lecturer At St. Lawrence

CANTON - A. Barton Hepburn Professor of Economics Jeffrey T. Young has been named the Frank P. Piskor Faculty Lecturer at St. Lawrence University and will give a talk on campus next spring on the topic "Justice, Property and Markets: Economics as Moral Philosophy."

The Piskor Faculty Lectureship was established in 1979 to encourage original and continued research among St. Lawrence faculty members, to recognize and honor distinguished scholarship and to afford the opportunity for faculty to share their learning with the academic community.

Young states of his project, "Adam Smith (1723-1790) is generally credited as the founder of the modern discipline of economics, because of his Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations (1776). However, Smith was a moral philosopher by profession, and he was already widely known in his day as the author of The Theory of Moral Sentiments (1759). Next year, 2009, marks the 250th anniversary of the publication of this book, and my Piskor Lecture will, in part, contribute to the celebration of Smith's too-long neglected first book."

The lecture, Young says, will continue a long-standing research program which considers the possible links between the two books. "In short, the project is about the interrelationships between what are now two distinct academic disciplines, moral philosophy and economics. I use Adam Smith's works as a template for what these interconnections might be, and more importantly, their significance for the modern practice of economics."

A graduate of the University of Maine, Young earned the Ph.D. at the University of Colorado. He has been on the faculty at St. Lawrence since 1980 and was named Hepburn Professor of Economics in 1995. He is the author of Classical Theories of Value from Smith to Sraffa (1978) and Economics as a Moral Science: The Political Economy of Adam Smith (1997).

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