Alan Krueger: Worker in the Vineyard of Economics

When a common man commits suicide, it is a tragedy for his family. When a leading authority commits suicide, it is a tragic loss for society. However, when a leading world-class economist commits suicide when being on the top of his still rising bright career, it is primarily the key economic question. It was the economic imperialism of Gary Becker that enabled the economic science to study each and every aspect of human life using the specific economic approach. In their article Suicide: An Economic Approach, Becker and Posner (2004) sought to explain suicide in terms of the utility function optimisation. They treated suicide as a purposive action that compares the benefits of continued living with the ‘benefits’ and ‘terror’ of death (Becker and Posner 2004:2). It is symptomatic that their article is opened by the proclamation that ‘it is about the choices made by very unhappy or miserable individuals. There are many options, including joining a gang, taking drugs, starting or resuming smoking, drinking heavily, gambling heavily, committing crimes, taking highly risky jobs, engaging in very risky sports, marrying in haste, divorcing, joining a church, visiting a psychiatrist, committing suicide, and still others’ (Becker and Posner 2004:1). Nobel Prize winner Gary Becker was probably the first economist who was able to recognise that if ‘Mathematics is the language in which God has written the Universe’, as Galileo Galilei claimed, the Economics is the language that can describe the world of humankind. The next generations of economists just could use this unique language and translate into it our everyday lives with their finest details. The great master of such translation and interpretation was without any doubt Alan B. Krueger (1960–2019). He was able to look at the world with prism of the utility functions, heterogeneity of preferences and rationality, which could explain the whole life from the cradle to the grave. When he suddenly died, the whole economic world mourned one of the economists who changed the face of our Ars et Scientia without touching her heart and her very essence. He was spontaneously remembered as the prominent labour economists who revolted against the standard approach towards the minimum wage; he was remembered as the Chairman of the Clinton ́s and Obama ́s Council of the Economic Advisers, as vice president of the American Economic Association in 2017, as one of the top 50 economists according to the number of citation (ranked 43 between his colleges and co-authors Daniel Kahneman and Lawrence H. Summers, IDEAS 2019) and, last but not least, as one of those who are ‘to watch for the Nobel Prize’ (Rampell 2013; Cronin 2013; Lahart 2011). Nevertheless, couple of his colleges asked themselves, how much was his sudden death influenced by his extraordinary ability to optimise the utility function. Besides his life–work theme of the labour economics and his last but beloved theme of the rockonomics, his academic research in the past decades had been devoted to the field of terrorism, on the one hand, and determinants of happiness, on the other hand. Both themes being closely connected to the suicides as the route Alan Krueger decided to undergo on the 16 March 2019. Krueger ́s very first serious scientific article, Reflecting on the inter-industry wage structure, was published in 1986 with his supervisor Lawrence Summers as the co-author. It was also his first contribution to the empirical discussion of the wage theory and labour economics. Already this article opposed the classical theory, as it questioned the optimal allocation of the output by the market, claiming that some industries are better candidates for policy encouragement than others (Krueger and Summers 1986:30). Moreover, they suggested that wage differentials can be a source of involuntary unemployment. His following article dealt with the question if the public workers are paid better than comparable private sector workers (Krueger 1988). His longitudinal study suggested that the pay gap is deepest on the highest levels and nearly non-existing on the lowest levels when comparing the public and private sector workers performing similar jobs. Nevertheless, his crucial contribution to the labour economics was the so-called Card–Krueger study Minimum wage and Employment: A Case Study of the Fast-Food Industry in New Jersey and Pennsylvania (Card and Krueger 1994). The standard economic theory suggests that the minimum wage ceteris paribus leads to the increase in unemployment especially amongst the young and low-qualified workers. On the contrary, Card and Krueger used kind of the natural quasi-experiment to prove the decrease in the