Assar Lindbeck

Carl Assar Eugén Lindbeck (born January 26, 1930) is an economics professor and an artist. He is still an active economist at Stockholm University and at the Research Institute of Industrial Economics (IFN). Lindbeck has done research on unemployment (e.g. the insider-outsider theory of employment), the welfare state (including the effect of changing social norms), and China's reformed economy. Lindbeck received a Ph.D. from Stockholm University in 1963 with the doctoral thesis A study in monetary analysis.

He is well-known to students of economics for his quip that "next to bombing, rent control seems in many cases to be the most efficient technique so far known for destroying cities".

Lindbeck previously headed the Institute for International Economic Studies at Stockholm University, Sweden. In 1992–1993 he headed the so-called "Lindbeck commission", which was appointed by the Government of Sweden to propose reforms in light of the then-ongoing economic crisis.

Lindbeck is a member of the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences, the Norwegian Academy of Science and Letters. and previously chaired the Academy's prize committee for the Sveriges Riksbank Prize in Economic Sciences.

Assar Lindbeck also has a theory on self-destructive welfare state dynamics, in which the welfare system erodes norms relating to work and responsibility. Change in the work ethic is related to a rising dependence on welfare state institutions.

Art

Lindbeck has held several small art exhibitions with his own productions in Stockholm. His paintings are typically introspective.

Bibliography

• The housing shortage. A study of the price system in the housing market (with Ragnar Bentzel och Ingemar Ståhl), Almqvist & Wiksell, Stockholm, 1963.
• The Insider-Outsider Theory of Employment and Unemployment, (with Dennis Snower) MIT Press, Cambridge, Massachusetts, 1988.
• The Swedish Experiment, SNS Förlag, Stockholm, 1997.