Dr. Paul Dale Bush, professor emeritus of economics at California State University, Fresno, is the 2009 Veblen-Commons Award winner, recognized by the Association for Evolutionary Economics for “career-long scholarly excellence.”
Bush retired from Fresno State in 2001. He received his Ph.D. from Claremont Graduate School and came to Fresno State in 1961 where he taught microeconomic theory, macroeconomic theory and policy, institutional economics and economics of ecology.
He established an international reputation for his publications on institutional economics, lectured throughout the United States and Europe and was a founding member of the European Association for Evolutionary Political Economy.
Besides classroom teaching, research and scholarly publication, Bush was actively involved in academic freedom issues during the 1960s, including a stint as president of the Association of California State College Professors.
He was a founding member, with four other Fresno State professors, of the Fresno Free College Foundation, an organization that continues to flourish and operates Fresno’s Pacifica Foundation public radio station, KFCF, FM 88.1.
The Veblen-Commons Award takes its name from Thorstein Veblen and John R. Commons, who were pivotal forces in the creation and development of original institutional economics in the early 20th century.
This discipline considers how economic conditions are affected by diverse cultures, inequalities of income, globalization, multinational corporations, technology, social and political power and the environment.
Dr. Janice Peterson, a professor of economics at Fresno state and a former student under Bush during her undergraduate years, introduced him at the award luncheon in San Francisco.
Part of the award tradition is a presentation by the honoree. Bush chose to summarize the arguments he developed for his paper “The Neoinstitutional Theory of Value,” which was published in the June issue of the Journal of Economic Issues.
