Galbraith Prize in Economics 2010

I am pleased to announce John Loxley as the winner of the 2010 John Kenneth Galbraith Prize in Economics. John will be joining us in Quebec City during the Canadian Economics Association meetings at the end of May to give the Second Galbraith Prize lecture. Please join us if you can make it!

Below is an overview of John’s credentials for the prize from Jim Stanford.

On behalf of the PEF membership, congratulations to John, and a big thank you to this year’s JKG Prize selection committee (Mel Watkins, Armine Yalnizyan, Erin Weir, Brian MacLean and David Pringle).

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John Loxley and the 2010 John Kenneth Galbraith Prize in Economics

Throughout his adult life John Loxley has worked to combine economic analysis, research, and publishing of the highest quality, with a deep personal commitment to social change and building the social change movements which will be the engine of change.  It isn’t enough for progressive thinkers to simply put the ideas out there and hope that someone does something about them.  We all have a responsibility to use whatever resources, platforms, and leverage we may have in our respective positions, to further in concrete ways the development of the movements and campaigns that will be essential in actually achieving the change that we envision.  John Loxley, to me, embodies that necessary duality between intellectual work and nitty-gritty movement-building.

His academic research in the fields of development economics, international monetary and financial systems, and community economic development, have been recognized internationally as making a substantial contribution to progressive thought in those fields.

However, it is more through his enduring and important personal commitment to activism that John has really left a lasting benefit for social change efforts in Canada and around the world. Despite his deserved international reputation, John never shied away from getting his hands dirty in the trenches of social change activism and organizing.  He has been consistently and heavily engaged in a range of different social change initiatives, projects, and organizing — ranging from his work with the North-South Institute and international debt justice initiatives, to his work co-founding the Choices coalition in Winnipeg and through it inspiring the Alternative Federal Budget (which this year will mark its 15th edition — an impressive and consistent record), to his personal involvement in a range of grass-roots economic development initiatives with First Nations communities in northern Manitoba.  John is always respectful and collegial with his fellow social-change activists, and never “lords over” them on the strength of his intellect and reputation.  He personally practices what he preaches, through his ongoing passion for and contribution to social change.

In addition to his personal research agenda and his personal involvement in a wonderful range of activist struggles and initiatives, John has also made a priority over the years of helping to build the University of Manitoba’s economics department into a well-regarded, collegial, and open-minded academic program.  This involves his unique ability to reach across normal ideological divides in the interests of building an inclusive, diverse, respectful, and workable department that fills a totally unique niche in Canada’s academic economic world.

I don’t know anyone in Canada who better embodies the spirit of engaged, activist intellectual work that we seek to honour with this award, than John Loxley.

Jim Stanford