Lincoln, Neb., Dec. 16, 2002--Greg Hayden said he couldn't believe it.
When the University of Nebraska-Lincoln economist answered his telephone earlier this fall, on the other end of the line was a representative of the Association for Evolutionary Economics calling to tell him he was the 34th winner of the association's annual Veblen-Commons Award.
"I was shocked. I wasn't expecting it at all," Hayden said. "I didn't know that I had been nominated. In fact, I had written a letter to the committee nominating someone else. Had I been guessing, I would have thought that might have been something that might happen 10 years from now. It's the highest professional honor I will receive in my life. I hope I can measure up."
Hayden, who will receive the award Jan. 3 in Washington, D.C., joins a distinguished circle of economists to receive the award, including Robert Heilbroner, John Kenneth Galbraith, Gunnar Myrdal and Rexford G. Tugwell. But he won't have to look far to find a previous winner. One is Wallace Peterson, George Holmes professor emeritus of economics at UNL, who won the award in 1992 and who hired Hayden as an assistant professor in 1967, the year before Hayden finished his doctorate at the University of Texas in Austin. Together, they make Nebraska the only institution with two winners of the Veblen-Commons Award.
The award, Hayden said, emphasizes economists who not only have been active in scholarly work, but who have also taken their expertise out into the real world. He said he thinks the main reason he won the award was probably for his development starting in 1982 of the Social Fabric Matrix, which allows researchers and policy-makers to integrate various aspects of the market economy with social and environmental conditions.
"The Social Fabric Matrix is a method for doing research whereby we can bring together all of the different aspects of what we might call the economy," Hayden said. "In other words, you have social institutions, you have technology, you have social beliefs that give you certain kinds of property laws, and so on. The Social Fabric Matrix allows us to get a handle on all of that."
The matrix has been used for major research projects in many countries, including Thailand, France, Australia, the United States, South Africa, the Netherlands and Iran. It has proven especially useful for the analysis of the interface between the ecological system and the economy. In this use, Hayden's most recent involvement has been as a conceptual consultant on research projects to determine sustainability of the Northwest Forest Plan on the North Olympic Peninsula of the state of Washington and to evaluate an industrial waste plan for the government of Thailand.
Hayden's invention is a natural tool for evolutionary economics, a sub-discipline that he said adds to orthodox economics, which is very much devoted to the theory of the market. It's also an important addition to traditional economics in the era of globalization.
"We have many different cultures and different normative criteria in those different systems," Hayden said. "We need a way to handle that, but a way that's not designed for just one system."
CONTACT: F. Gregory Hayden, Professor, Economics, (402) 472-2332 (ghayden1@unl.edu)
For questions regarding these releases, contact:
tsimons1@unl.edu
(402) 472-8514, Fax: (402) 472-7825