The piece was written by journalist, essayist, and Strange Matters co-editor John Michael Colón, who’s previously covered the heterodox econ beat before in his two-part series with Steve Mann about the history of MMT (see Part I and Part II).
It tells the story of how Lee – a pioneer of heterodox economics and a lifelong member of the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW) – over the course of decades took a leading role in organizing the heterodox schools of economics within the university and in creating a comprehensive alternative to the neoclassical orthodoxy.
This charismatic, gossip-filled, theoretically rigorous, but often playful essay is the first comprehensive account of Lee’s accomplishments, which includes:
- A detailed institutional history of how economics departments were purged in the twentieth century, with extensive documentation of the campaigns of harassment, firings, frame-ups, and coups to which Institutionalists, Post-Keynesians, Marxians, feminists, and others were subjected.
- As a result of the former, a comprehensive overview of the real history of economic thought. This context allowed Lee to trace the common origins and insights of the dissident schools and work his way towards a new, exciting synthesis of the heterodox traditions.
- A robust alternative to neoclassical microeconomics (which, Colón argues, is the core of neoclassical theory more generally), where Lee uses hundreds of historical studies to show that there is no lawlike, functional relationship between price and quantity. Instead, Lee develops and synthesizes pre-existing heterodox traditions into his theory of administered prices, his theory of market governance, and his theory of oligopolistic competition (among others) to show how markets and industries form, mature, and decline in the real world, as opposed to the fantasies of mainstream economists.
Dr. Tae-Hee Jo 
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