Sex and the Ivy League

Graciela Chichilnisky

Columbia University

New York, November 2003

Life is strange. As a child I followed a peaceful inner path that led to matching professional and family lives. In harmony with my goals, I felt able to achieve what was important. I was a ‘tomboy’ attracted to masculine arenas and accomplishments, and did not think of myself as a woman. A good challenge is for me the spice of life.

Yet somewhere along this path I met uncontrollable forces, full of sound and fury, that thrust me up close into the stormy transition of women’s roles at the turn of the 21^st century.

Sex is a powerful force; it is the battleground that shapes the creation and the survival of the species. This is clear. Yet nothing could have prepared me for the response to this life force that I observed during my professional journey as a mathematician and an economist, in two male dominated fields. I joined Columbia University, a great Ivy League institution, in 1977, recruited by two eminent economists Ned Phelps and Robert Mundell. Only much later I learned from the American Association of University Women that Columbia is known as one of the most problematic institutions for the progress of women in academia and one of the most resistant pockets of male dominance in the US University system. For me, Columbia has become a challenge to meet, and the road to merge my internal and external lives: my personal values with my public life.

Two reflections

This thumbnail sketch will focus on a strange and even bewildering period of my life that was dominated by issues of sex within the Ivy League. The choice of focus is not idle, because these issues lend clarity to my values and add significance to my life. They led me to distill two simple reflections that changed my life and that I wish to share with the reader.

The first reflection is that for a woman to survive and to thrive she must learn to turn negative responses into positive resources. This is a perverse reversal to the Pavlovian response. I call this, for short, ‘turning dung into fertilizer.’ I believe it is one of the most important elements for women’s success and happiness. It is a wonderful recipe for dealing with the ‘glass ceiling’, a well-known and somewhat cruel situation where the more you succeed, the more you get punished. Think of it this way-- energy is energy — and simply changing the sign of the response one receives from negative to positive allows one to use all the energy received constructively, and turn it into a survival tool. In mathematical terms, this is “life modulo two.” It is the absolute value of the response that counts, not the sign.

For women who are at the frontier, there is one positive feature of the strategy of transforming ‘dung into fertilizer.’ When using negative responses as fertilizer, one never runs out of resources.

The second reflection is simpler, and perhaps more fundamental. It is that the only genuine source of happiness in life is the feeling of being useful to others. Nothing else does the job. This is true for anybody. It is not achievement or success, it is not money. It is this feeling of being useful that counts. This is why the issues of sex and the Ivy League are important to me, and below I explain why.

David and Goliath

My struggle for justice within the University met with the administrations’ indifference and scorn for many years, eventually leading to a lawsuit that became a David and Goliath epic of sorts, lasting 11 years so far. The American Association of University Women, an association that encompasses over 160,000 women in the US, now supports my case as a landmark. It is expected to go to trial in New York next year. Almost paradoxically, throughout this arduous process my inner path actually strengthened. My internal peace and happiness were fortified. I learned to see more clearly what was important in life and in my work. I achieved compassion for other women many of whom had lives much more difficult than my own, and the desire to help them out. I had the privilege of achieving a connection with many University women whose life I appear to be reliving in this journey. This connection has made my life better; indeed I believe it has made me a better person because now I can be useful to others. I can try to prevent others from reliving my own life. This is a rare privilege. As I have learned, it is the only true source of happiness.

Born in Buenos Aires after WWII

I was born in Buenos Aires after WWII, into a warm and loving family of Jewish intellectuals who fled the Russian ‘pogroms’ at the turn of the 20^th century and migrated to Argentina to build a future. I was the second of three children of a wonderful and very prominent man, Salomon Chichilnisky, who built many hospitals in Argentina and a large part of its National Health system as the Secretary of Health in Juan Peron’s government and beyond. My father started life carrying loads in the docks in the port of Buenos Aires to support his parents, brothers and sisters. Against all odds he became a medical doctor and the first Jew to became a Chaired Professor of neurology at the School of Medicine of the University of Buenos Aires, in Neurology. He eloped with my mother, Raquel Gavensky who was a child from a wealthy fur exporting family, and was as beautiful as she was intelligent and kind, 25 years younger than my father. Both were wonderful. They died while I was in my thirties.

Discovering Mathematics and Eduardo Jose

Attending high school in Buenos Aires, at an advanced all-girls school called Instituto Nacional de Lenguas Vivas, I discovered that Jews were not really welcome. Being the first in the class did not help. Being the first in the class did not help. I always worked hard and had the best grades but somehow I could never make it to the position of raising the flag in the morning’s convocation in the school’s old patio, a position that is given to the best students. There was always something missing. Finally when all excuses were gone, in my last year in that school there came a day when without doubt I was the only one that could raise the flag in an important school event. I was full of pride as my illusion was finally to be fulfilled. Suddenly, hours before the event, the schoolmistress found that there was a small spot in my white uniform. I called my mother home and she rushed to school with another fresh uniform and gave it to the headmistress. However after she was gone the schoolmistress discovered to my surprise that there was a small button missing in the second uniform. My wonderful mother brought then another button, but when she came back for the second time — they had put me in a small room to wait for her and somehow nobody could steer her to where I was. There she stood with the button as I waited for her in another room of the school, and we never met. In the meantime, the ceremony unfolded and my mother stood there watching as someone else raised the flag. This was the last time I could have done this act at the school. My mother thought that I had done something wrong by being kept away in this manner — and so did several others who knew that it was my turn to raise the flag. The suspicion lingered in the school since then, and I learned first hand what it means to ‘blame the victim’ -- without of course knowing those exact words at the time.

In my junior year at high school I started taking courses informally at the University of Buenos Aires. Initially, I tried Philosophy and Sociology, because I always thought that those were the main topics facing humankind and the areas where more progress was needed, namely in human and social organization. However I gave up these topics quickly in favor of Mathematics-- Mathematics seemed clearer and therefore easier---with the idea of going back to social issues later on. I wanted to do Mathematics that would be applied to resolve social problems. I thought that studying Mathematics first would give me a control of the ‘technology’ that economists use to validate their theories and their policies. I felt it was important to ‘control the technology’—rather than ‘be controlled by it’--- since many economists appear to fear the mathematical foundations of economics and adopt theories or policies based on what they learn from others mathematical models. I always liked the idea of creating my own mathematical models, rather than adopting somebody else’s. Mathematics was a pleasure to learn. I think of it as the natural language that the brain uses to communicate with itself.

My first child, Eduardo Jose, was born in Buenos Aires at about the time I finished high school. Eduardo Jose was a healthy, happy, beautiful and loving baby who grew up to become my best friend and ally. He is now a professor of neurobiology at the Salk Institute of the University of California in San Diego, where he lives with his wife Sascha and baby Ariella. While in retrospect Eduardo Jose had a hard life, born in Buenos Aires and growing up in the US with little money and while his mother was completing two PhD degrees, he was the greatest source of pleasure and sense of accomplishment for me. It is true that children are the greatest pleasures in life.

A Military Coup led to MIT

Just as I was about to start college in Buenos Aires, there was a ‘coup d’ etat’ and a military junta took over Argentina and closed down the University. The students demonstrated against their actions. A notable American mathematician from MIT, Warren Ambrose, was at that time a visiting Professor at the University of Buenos Aires. He was hit and hurt by the military police when they closed down the campus and after this incident decided to go back to MIT and take some of the brightest PhD students he met in Buenos Aires with him. I had not started college yet, nor did I know much English, but through the college courses I had taken informally Ambrose and others recommended me as a ‘special student’ to the Mathematics Department at MIT. I became a special PhD student without having gone to college, with the task of proving myself in the first year of graduate studies in order to be accepted as a regular student. Thus in 1967 I moved with baby Eduardo Jose to Boston where I started my ‘test year' at MIT.

My adviser at MIT was the excellent and late mathematician Norman Levenson, a specialist in ordinary differential equations, and a kindly man who wished well. He recommended that I should give all of this up. He told me that being a woman, a single woman with a small child, and having to compete with PhD students in a top Mathematics Department when I had not even gone to college myself, was an impossible task. He recommended that I move instead to Boston University to study a lesser subject such as computers. However, the Ford Foundation generously provided me with a scholarship, and I completed my first year of PhD courses at the graduate program in Mathematics ranked first in the class, thus becoming officially a PhD student at MIT. Eduardo Jose, now almost 2 years old, lived with me through this process sharing a room in Cambridge Massachusetts. The hardship of this enormous effort solidified our bond. During this period I met Alberto Baider also a PhD student at MIT and now a Professor at Hunter College in New York, and Ahmad Chalabi, who was also a PhD student of Mathematics at MIT working with Warren Ambrose, and who since then became a leader of the Iraqi opposition to Saddam Hussein and the founder in 1992 of the Iraqi National Congress in London. Overcoming enormous difficulties, this period fortified my will and my belief that hard work can conquer almost all. It was the beginning of my view that women need a ‘reverse Pavlovian’ response to succeed. After that record of success, I was accepted also at UC Berkeley where I completed my PhD in Mathematics in 1971.

UC Berkeley-- Jerry Marsden, Moe Hirsch and Steve Smale

My PhD adviser at UC Berkeley was Jerrold Marsden, a prominent Canadian mathematician who specializes in fluid dynamics. Other mentors included well-known mathematicians Stephen Smale and Moe Hirsch all of whom became aware of the difficulties that I had to face as a female student of Mathematics. My PhD dissertation was on ‘Group Actions on Spin Manifolds’ and appeared in the Bulletin of the American Mathematical Society in 1972 where it was accepted with great reviews by the editor and two referees, who I believe were Shlomo Sternberg and Roger Penrose, a distinguished mathematician and a wonderful physicist respectively. Shlomo became a friend who became years later the Chairman of the Mathematics Department at Harvard University. The topic was very attractive, and established a pattern in my life, dealing with the intersection of two fields that rarely come together: algebraic topology and physics. I used this to explore the possible ‘shape’ of a Universe in which there was a conservation of ‘spin angular momentum’. This dissertation dealt with questions such as the finiteness of the Universe and its global geometrical structure, an area that has continued to be very fashionable years later. Given the positive response my dissertation had, it was tempting to continue that path. While at UC Berkeley I worked also for the cause of women students who had a hard time, with small children—like myself—and created the first US University ‘child care center’ within the Berkeley Campus, with the help of the United Automobile Workers Association, a child care center that Eduardo Jose attended himself at the time. I understand this center is still working and has been imitated at other universities.

After completing my PhD in Mathematics I discovered from Jerry Marsden that other students had attributed my PhD dissertation to him, which was unseemly and untrue, and the record was subsequently cleared. This was difficult to understand indeed shocking to me, since Marsden never worked on Algebraic Topology himself, which was the core of my dissertation. Since that time, UC Berkeley became known for the problems that women had in their Mathematics Department. Several lawsuits successfully litigated against them for gender discrimination, gaining tenure at UC Berkeley for women such as Jenny Harrison who had been unfairly denied it. Charity Hirsch, Morris Hirsch’s wife, became a leading figure in assisting the cause of women faculty in the entire University of California system. Charity was also the person who suggested to me in 2002 that the American Association of University Women should hear about my case, and arranged the introduction to Amy Houghton who leads their Legal Advocacy Fund, resulting in their adopting and funding my case against Columbia at the end of 2002.

PhD in Mathematics and creating Basic Needs

Towards the end of my studies at UC Berkeley, my father became very ill and I started commuting to Buenos Aires to see him. He was seventy years old. To support this expensive traveling I started working in Argentina part-time—in particular while completing my PhD in Mathematics I took a job as a Director of Modeling at Fundacion Bariloche, located in the town of the same name in the south of Argentina. My job was to create a mathematical model of the world economy, which was later called the Bariloche Model. I was collaborating with an interdisciplinary team of prominent Latin American scientists, including geologists, sociologists, population experts, computer scientists, political scientists and economists. Their aim was to rebut the Club of Rome’s Limits to Growth vision of a world in which developing countries could not, and should not, grow because otherwise they would exhaust the Earth’s resources. In the Bariloche model I created the concept of “development based on the satisfaction of basic needs.” This led to my first two publications in Economics, “Economic Development and the Satisfaction of Basic Needs” published in 1977, and in 1976 Catastrophe or New Society: A Latin American World Model, a book co-authored with the Bariloche team. Both of these publications introduced Basic Needs in the literature and implemented it empirically with data from five continents. The name itself was created in those publications, and the concept of Basic Needs became my first real contribution to Economics-- a somewhat radical concept at the time. It was nevertheless adopted by 166 nations in 1987 at the Earth Summit of Rio de Janeiro who voted it as the cornerstone of efforts to define Sustainable Development. Basic needs is now officially part of the Brundtland Commission’s definition of sustainable development, but at the time I had to threaten to resign my job in Bariloche because the rest of the team wanted the model to focus in GDP maximization rather than on satisfaction of Basic Needs as I wanted. Maximizing GDP was not, in my view, the main goal of development for the world economy, nor the way to use the Earth’s resources wisely. I won, and Basic Needs became the trademark for the Bariloche Model igniting interest and controversy around the world. Our book was translated in 8 languages, and it was read all over the world—in France it was published by the Presses Universitaires de France and called, very suitably, Un Monde Pour Tous. People still write to me about Basic Needs and the Bariloche model. Eventually Basic Needs penetrated the United Nations system and the World Bank, becoming a world standard in re-thinking fair and sustainable economic development.

The great and late mathematician and economist Tjalling Koopmans and William Nordhaus, his distinguished Yale colleague, gave the Bariloche Model and Basic Needs a very supportive reception organizing an entire meeting at the International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis (IIASA) in Vienna, Austria in 1976. After that Koopmans became a strong supporter and Nordhaus, also very supportive, wrote at the time an article that commended the Bariloche model and its goal of satisfying Basic Needs as a unique combination of ‘radical thinking with state of the art technical expertise’.

Back to Argentina and a second PhD

After completing a PhD in Mathematics at UC Berkeley, I went back to Buenos Aires in 1972 where I was appointed as a Member of the Presidential Cabinet of Banco Central of Argentina, the country’s monetary authority. This high level position would allow me to build a career in economic policy with political influence in Argentina like my father had. I took this job during a period of democratic presidential rule, and the career path seemed very attractive. Yet I saw first hand how decisions on monetary policy were made, and how little we knew about it all. It was then that I decided I wanted to go back to the social sciences, and study economics to understand fully the role of markets, particularly international markets, which I considered key.

I received a scholarship from the Central Bank of Argentina to obtain a second PhD, this time in Economics, and was accepted both at Yale University and at UC Berkeley. I decided to go back to Berkeley where I obtained officially a PhD in Economics in 1976. During this period, while I was completing my second PhD, my father died in Buenos Aires. This was heartbreaking. My mother joined me in Berkeley where we lived with my son Eduardo Jose for some time. But she was heartbroken and homesick, and went back to Buenos Aires, where she herself died about six years after my father.

This period, when I lost my father and then my mother, was the worst part of my life. Adding to the pain, the legal system in Argentina prevented me from visiting my parents towards the end because at the time the law gave all rights to the father for the traveling of the child. This meant that I could not travel to Buenos Aires unless I left Eduardo Jose in Berkeley—which was impossible. My father and mother died without seeing Eduardo Jose again, their dearest grandchild. This taught me a bitter lesson—at that time in Argentina, marriage gave men undue rights on a woman’s life and made it more difficult to take care of one’s children. This strengthened my commitment to do what I could so future women would not face similar situations.

Harvard University and Kenneth Arrow

In 1974, I left Berkeley to go to Harvard University, with a master degree in Economics but before completing an official PhD in Economics. At Harvard I was to work as a Research Associate with Kenneth Arrow in an Office of Naval Research (ONR) grant. Kenneth Arrow became an important mentor for me. The research position at Harvard involved collaborating also with Peter Kalman an excellent economist and friend from the State University of New York at Stoney Brook, who sadly died prematurely a few years later. At the time I went to Harvard I had successfully finished all my courses and PhD exams, and also completed a first draft of a PhD dissertation in Economics that I produced for Gerard Debreu, my PhD adviser at Berkeley. However obtaining the second PhD in Economics proved to be more difficult than the first because of the personalities involved, and particularly because of their attitude towards women.

As a foreign woman and a single mother, I started to face bewildering circumstances in the submission of my second PhD dissertation. This led me eventually to abandon all the research done in the first dissertation I wrote in Economics and to write, two years later, while I was teaching at Harvard and after publishing several articles, a third and completely different PhD dissertation. This was the second dissertation I wrote in Economics, and the third PhD dissertation I wrote in my life. In 1976, while I was teaching at Harvard, I was awarded officially a PhD in Economics with Gerard Debreu as my main adviser.

I learned a great deal during this process, about how women’s intellectual property is treated in the masculine world of academia. Some of my colleagues and competitors at Harvard attributed my dissertation to Morris Hirsch who was then a visiting professor at the Mathematics Department at Harvard. I was blissfully unaware of this unseemly and incorrect claim. However, Moe Hirsch found out himself and confronted the colleague and competitor who had initiated the rumor. Kenneth Arrow heard about this too, and did the same. My colleague claimed to have been ‘joking’ and was told by them that such comments are ‘not jokes’ and he apologized. Interestingly, he apologized to them and not to me, the main affected party. This ‘joke’ may have cost me a great deal; in particular Kenneth Arrow and Michael Spence at that point found it very difficult to obtain a fair hearing for a tenure track position for me at Harvard then—as the rumors, while eventually dispelled, raised questions at the time. Eventually I left Harvard and the terrible ‘joke’ became clearly known as such and I was vindicated.

All this made me aware in the years that followed of the plights of other women in Ivy League universities whose intellectual work had been stolen or duplicated with impunity, or attributed to others. Such episodes were familiar to these women; particularly at the time they obtained their PhD dissertations. Recently, several women at the American Association of University Women who I had the privilege to know told me similar stories. A couple of women I knew, from Yale and from Princeton, were sufficiently depressed that they thought of committing suicide. Recently I saw a documentary on the work of Rosalind Franklin, whose work in London was a key part of finding the structure of DNA. Yet her work is not mentioned along with that of the other authors, Crick and Watson, not even by the president of Princeton University who is also a woman and a biologist, in her 2003 editorial article in the Princeton Magazine, about the 50^th anniversary of the discovery of DNA structure. I left Harvard to go to Columbia, where I thought the situation was then better, although eventually it followed the same overall pattern.

While it is hard enough to compete with men in academic research, obtaining credit for what one has accomplished proved to be much more difficult. Years later in the book “The Outer Circle” these findings were substantiated by the co-authors, several sociologists who included Jonathan Cole who later on became a Provost at Columbia University. The book documents that academic citations are consistently biased against women. Men resist giving women the basis for measuring academic achievement. They successfully deny them credit for their work in the form of academic citations. This problem is true today and in my case it has only become worse as my work has become better known.

Although at the time I won the battle and completed my PhD in Economics, I may have lost a war. It was a war that I did not know existed. I was simply trying to do my best, unaware of the effect that broken stereotypes could have on others, and certainly unaware at the time of the ‘glass ceiling.’ Things do not get easier as you progress and prove yourself —they get more difficult. As a woman, the more you succeed, the more you are punished.

Teaching at Harvard and traveling to Bariloche

By 1976 I became a Lecturer at Harvard, where I taught Mathematical Economics. During the time I was there, from 1974 to 1978, I published some of the defining work in my career, in particular the book on the Bariloche Model and Basic Needs, Catastrophe or New Society, the work that introduced Hilbert spaces in Optimal growth theory and solved outstanding problems of duality in that area, and some of my best work on international trade in which I showed that export-led growth can backfire as a foundation for growth in a country with abundant labor supply and must be replaced by policies that shore-up domestic markets.

Towards the end of that period I also published my work on international aid or Transfers, and on Topology and Social Choice. The latter demonstrates the intrinsic geometrical structure of the paradoxes of Social Choice, and found a resolution to the social choice paradox. The latter is an area that Kenneth Arrow had initiated many years ago while he was a PhD student at Columbia University, closing a cycle in the development of the subject.

United Nations and Philippe de Seynes

Towards the end of the period at Harvard I received a visit by M. Philippe De Seynes a Frenchman who had just left his post as Under Secretary General for Economic and Social Affairs at the United Nations to lead the United Nations Institute for Training and Research in New York, UNITAR. Phillipe was an important figure in international diplomacy, and an admirable man. He thought that my concept of Basic Needs was the way to the future, and encouraged me to produce further work in that area, but like me he thought it needed international market underpinnings. Hired by him I started my official career as UN advisor running UNITAR’s international research projects starting in 1976 for about 10 years. My work with UNITAR was based on the fame that the Basic Needs concept had achieved and the value that the Bariloche Model had in pursuing the development strategies for the third world.

Columbia, Ned Phelps and Bob Mundell

At the end of the period at Harvard, I met also two wonderful economists from Columbia University: Ned Phelps, a friend of Kenneth Arrow, and Robert Mundell, both of whom recruited me successfully as an Associate Professor at Columbia University starting in the fall of 1977. At that time I almost took a job as a researcher at the Bell Labs of AT&T, and was offered also by President Harold Shapiro of the University of Michigan a position as associate professor at their Economics department.

However Columbia University attracted me at the time because of the proximity to the United Nations in New York, and because of the first class people I met there. Robert Mundell is a warm man and one of the most original and incisive thinkers I have ever met, and Ned Phelps is equally warm --- an extraordinarily distinguished economist in a class all of his own. My instincts were right, because there are truly wonderful people at Columbia. With hindsight, however, I see that I underestimated the disfunctionalities created within the Ivy League by the turbulent transition of the roles of women at the turn of the 21^st century.

Sussex, Essex and Geoffrey Heal

I joined the Columbia faculty in the fall of 1977, and during 1978 I spent part of the year working at the Harvard Institute for International Development (HIID) in continuation of the growing research project I directed then for the United Nations and UNITAR, called Technology Distribution and North South Relations. In expanding this project to Europe, I started a collaboration with Dr. Sam Cole of the University of Sussex’ Science Policy Research Unit, a specialist in the MIT Limits to Growth model, who joined me as a co-director of a larger UNITAR project which then included a team of interdisciplinary researchers in four continents. This project acquired a large projection in the United Nations organization and had a major impact on policy, leading to discussions and resolutions related to Basic Needs, export-led growth and international aid, supported by an excellent team of researchers.

In England I also met Geoffrey Heal, a Cambridge University economic theorist who had recently become the Chair of the Economics Department of the University of Sussex. This turned out to be a defining event in my life, because several years later in 1983 Geoff Heal joined Columbia University as a Professor in the Business School, soon he and I became prolific co-authors and Geoffrey eventually became the father of my second child, my daughter Natasha Sable, who was born in New York in 1987.

United Nations, World Bank and OPEC

By 1978 I was promoted as a tenured Associate Professor at Columbia, a year after arriving at the University, and in 1980 became a tenured full Professor of Economics at Columbia. During late 1979 and 1980 I accepted the Keynes Chair at the Economics Department University of Essex, living in England during a period of leave from Columbia University and returning to Columbia in 1981. During this period I also acted as an adviser to OPEC in several wonderful summers spent in Vienna, at the World Bank in Washington DC, and the United Nations in Geneva. Both the World Bank and the United Nations were naturally aligned and very interested in my concept of Basic Needs and in using mathematical and economic modeling to make it operational in economic terms. In Geneva the International Labor Office (ILO) of the United Nations started an entire research effort based on Basic Needs in a number of countries. Basic needs took off as a paradigm for alternative development. I also advised the World Bank on trade policy and on international aid during that period. At OPEC in Vienna, I created a computational model of the world economy where the role of their organization was seen in an integrated international market framework—showing how high oil prices could eventually backfire for their organization. This period was full of insights in theoretical and policy terms, and eventually led to the publication of two books, The Evolving International Economy and Oil and the International Economy, both co-authored with Geoffrey Heal, which are discussed below.

North South Trade: Export Led Growth

While initially I had great difficulties publishing my work --- it was considered too mathematical and too ‘different’ --- at the end of the 1970’s my list of publications started to grow fast, and from 1980 on my research and publications took on a life of their own.

In addition to mathematical economics, one angle that greatly interested me due to my work at Bariloche and the United Nations was to see the world divided into a North and a South, two regions that were in two very different stages of development. The North represents the nations that have already completed the industrial revolution, while the South is in the midst of a change from agricultural to industrial societies. Coincidentally, the geography of the planet is such that the industrial countries are indeed mostly in the Northern Hemisphere and the developing nations in the Southern hemisphere, which explained the North-South divide. I thought this divide was pregnant with explanatory power. In particular I thought it could be used to explain the dynamics of the world economy. I focused on two policies that I thought were misguided and could be improved: one was the emphasis on international aid as the most important way to resolve poverty and other developing nations’ problems. The second was the emphasis on recommending developing nations to specialize in resource - intensive or labor-intensive exports as the main policy to accelerate economic growth. Both policies seemed wrong to me, and I looked for ways to model what I thought were the main issues, to explain them mathematically in order to offer alternatives. In the process I created a model of international trade that in time became an alternative to the existing models created by Heckscher Ohlin and by Ricardo— and ended up being called my North-South model.

At that point in time international trade was modeled either as a Heckscher-Ohlin world, consisting of two countries trading with each other who differ only in the relative proportions of capital and labor, or modeled as a Ricardian world where the two countries differ in technological productivity in two sectors. In each case the differences (factor proportions or technologies) were used to explain why countries trade with each other, and why they benefit from trade.

My view was different. I thought that the world was divided into two regions that were in two different stages of development. In one region, the ‘South’, labor was abundant in the sense of Arthur Lewis, namely very ‘elastic’ labor supplies, and technologies were quite different in terms of factor use across the two sectors. I described this by saying that the South had ‘dual technologies’ and ‘abundant labor’. In the North matters are different. The economy is more homogeneous, in the sense that factor use is similar across the two sectors, and labor supply is fixed as in the Heckscher-Ohlin world. In sum, my Southern region was close to the Arthur Lewis’ model of a developing economy, while my Northern region was closer to a Heckscher-Ohlin model of an economy. My North-South model represented a world where Heckscher-Ohlin trade with Arthur Lewis.

I felt that seeing a world where trade occurs between such different nations has tremendous explanatory power. Such a world is quite different from one where trade occurs between equals (as in Ricardo or in Heckscher Ohlin). I was right in the sense that the results I obtained in the North South model on classic topics, such as trade policies or transfers, were radically different from the results that other economist had obtained up to that point.

My work in international trade quickly became well known, particularly my models of export- led growth and of transfers, and it started to take over my life. While the attention it received was flattering, the results created a lively controversy in the US as well as in Europe, and some hostility as well. The work on export-led growth was considered heresy by those who advocated growth for developing countries based on exports, and particularly exports of labor-intensive products. In a way, they were right in considering my work heresy. I was advocating economic growth based on strengthening domestic markets, while the ‘export-led growth’ vision saw the engine of growth for developing countries in the industrialized world, with the domestic economy being mostly a source of cheap labor. This to me was a neocolonialist way of looking at the economy of a developing country—and one that was dated and could not succeed in the modern world.

Another heresy: International Aid and Transfers

My 1980 results on transfers were somewhat unsettling because they turned on its head common wisdom with respect to international aid. International aid was considered at the time, to be the leading solution to the increasing North-South wealth differential. In the late 1970’s and early 1980’s, great economists such as Wassily Leontief were advocating international aid in their United Nations projects as a solution to close the gap between the North and the South. In my view, this was once again looking at developing nations as dependent on the industrial countries, and not the engine of their own growth.

Earlier, great economists such as Stuart Mill, John Maynard Keynes, and Wassily Leontief had anticipated that aid could help the donor more than it helps the receiver, due to the effect of market forces after the gift. While those classic economists had shown this to be a possibility, Paul Samuelson and his student Robert Mundell had argued that this effect was more of a ‘curiosum’ than real, that in well behaved markets aid always ends up benefiting the receiver, as it is intended to do. Their arguments view market forces as benign. My work, however, showed the opposite. I showed that international aid that ends up benefiting the donor and hurting the receiver, is a standard phenomenon. It happens in well-behaved, competitive and stable markets, and in markets that have unique equilibrium. It is not a curiosum. Markets are not that benign. This is something that Paul Samuelson and Robert Mundell said could never happen. This work appeared in my 1980 Journal of Development Economics article “Basic Goods, Effects of International Transfers and the International Economic Order”, and led to a lively controversy for several years. My 1980 article dealt with what has been called the ‘transfer paradox’ it refers to the fact that markets forces can subvert the intentions of international aid, because a donor can end up better off than the receiver of the gift due to market forces.

My contribution to this classic issue was looking at a world with three or more trading nations — while Samuelson and Mundell had restricted their work to worlds with no more than two countries. Here is where my mathematics helped—by allowing me to attack a more complex but more realistic problem while other economists shied away from this because of the intrinsic mathematical difficulties.

In the debate that ensued, many articles were written about the results on transfers and the export led work, and eventually in the early 1980’s two separate issues of the MIT Journal of Development Economics, then edited by Lance Taylor at MIT, were dedicated to comments on these two results. One issue of the JDE had two volumes dedicated to comments on the results on export-led growth, and a second issue of the JDE was dedicated to the work on transfers. The debate was heated to the point that UNITAR, which was funding my research, received a letter from one of my colleagues calling my results ‘dangerous’ and untrue. Eventually, however, everybody accepted the validity of my results on transfers, particularly after an excellent geometrical article published by Geoffrey Heal and John Geanakoplos that made the points transparent and easy to grasp.

Here is the point: Transfers alter market prices. After the gift, the donor country has fewer resources but their market value goes up so the country ends up richer than before. The opposite happens to the receiver; this is the competitive market at work. The results on export-led growth were also accepted although there was some debate because the dynamical system I used was more complex from that used frequently in trade theory. The publication of these three volumes of the JDE created a stressful situation at Columbia because our Department of Economics was renowned for its contributions to international trade, the field where all this activity was taking place.

Columbia stirs and Natasha is born

After reading the previous sections, anyone that knows academia would predict that some friction might develop with my colleagues at my home institution, Columbia University. Friction is a well-known by-product of innovation. Yet the situation was complicated by my gender and by my national background. Young women from Argentina have an ‘image’ in the United States that does not tally with the events I related above.

Starting in the beginning of the 1980s, through the Chairs of the Department of Economics, Columbia gradually removed my ability to teach students in international trade as well as economic theory, even though they were my main fields. This was very painful as forming students is the reason I became a professor at Columbia. I tried to remind myself—and still try—that John Maynard Keynes was never a professor of economics at Cambridge University in the UK, that he was a lecturer in Mathematics there instead; and that Kenneth Arrow was not offered the job he wanted at Columbia after he completed his PhD dissertation because his work while interesting ‘was not economics’. Yet the hostility escalated as my work became better known. Indeed as I grew professionally, it became relentless. Some of my colleagues recommended to my students not to work with me, others wrote threatening letters to my sources of funding and published numerous articles against my work; others acting as editors limited the ability of authors to write extending my work in this area. The campaign against my work extended to the Columbia administration, and created a hostile climate in which it was very difficult to work. This happened even though my teaching evaluations were very good, and even though there was at some level a clear recognition of the value and interest of my work. Or perhaps because of this.

At Columbia I have excellent colleagues who tried to stop this trend, but the forces of darkness succeeded. This is not unique to Columbia—I read of very similar circumstances and events at MIT and other top Universities which led them in 2001 to create a Commission of nine university presidents, led by MIT’s president, which publicly acknowledged the problem of gender discrimination against the female faculty of their universities and sought to redress it and its deleterious effects on the University. Eventually my assistants’ offices at the Economics Department were destroyed and my own office made unusable, my courses were removed, I was marginalized and treated with hostility, and my salary became so low that years later it had to be almost doubled and still remained below the average of male full professors. Starting in 1981 and during ten years I pursued official efforts to overcome this injustice internally. This included internal inquiries and detailed reports by Columbia University Senate’s Faculty Affairs Committee, recommending a correction to the ‘injustice’ that had been committed in my case. Yet the University persisted in denying me even a proper hearing.

FITEL

In December 1985 I took a short leave from Columbia and started a company called FITEL with a group of friends who included Geoffrey Heal, Eduardo Jose, and Jeff Bezos, who since then became the Founder and CEO of Amazon.com. I became FITEL’s Chairman and CEO, and raised $6 million in investment that I transformed into a $30 million corporate valuation in 2 years. The company was ahead of its time. It offered financial services to support international trading of securities, services which only recently has industry started to imitate. Based on state of the art electronic technology, FITEL created the first global electronic network offering global processing and communications — one that preceded the Internet and the world wide web --- facilitating communications and matching of securities trades between US, Europe and Japan. I created the software, developed it and marketed the services, and led successfully as CEO a group of about 60 people in three continents. FITEL became a very profitable and well-known company. With offices in New York, London and Tokyo, it offered me a shelter against the hostility at Columbia, a way to succeed without being punished.

In the midst of this development, my daughter Natasha Sable was born in New York in August 1987. In my eyes, Natasha was the most beautiful and happy baby ever known. She was born sufficiently apart from my first child Eduardo Jose that I had forgotten the rigors of motherhood. Natasha’s fate was to travel widely since birth, and by the time she was one year old she had her birthday party in a plane to Tokyo. Eventually the pressures of motherhood led me to sell my stake in the company, which is now a successful communications provider in Japan, and dedicate myself to care for Natasha for a year.

Increasing Returns and Oil in the International Economy

Following this period I started the study of trade with increasing returns to scale, a topic that became rather popular years later, and published several articles and two more books, The Evolving International Economy published by Cambridge University Press in 1993, and Oil and the International Economy published by the Clarendon Press of the Oxford University Press in 1996, both co-authored with Geoffrey Heal.

The Evolving International Economy focused on the theory and policy of international trade in a world divided into industrial and developing nations, a world in which increasing returns to scale were achieving increasing importance. The book was an outgrowth of the Bariloche Model for me, because it integrated the North South issues in the context of international markets. In the Bariloche model there were no international markets—while this book was all about them.

This book led to many insights and policy predictions, some of which are still unfolding today. For example, we predicted that increasing returns to scale sectors are the first to ‘boom’ when the market upswings, and the first to ‘bust’ with lows in the business cycle. For example, telecommunications and airspace industries showed extravagant growth in the dot.com boom while just about all firms in these sectors became bankrupt in today’s long downswing. This was our prediction, and it has come to pass.

Our book also predicted an increasing wealth differential between the North and the South as long as such trade policies persisted, emphasizing decreasing returns exports from the South and increasing return exports from the North --- a wealth gap that unfortunately has come to pass also. The book called for an end to the resource exports policies in developing nations, proposing to strengthen internal markets as an alternative policy. I stand behind those recommendations now more than ever.

The second book during this period Oil and the International Economy, published in 1991, focused on oil as the single most strategic resource exported by developing countries. It pointed out that oil is a “double-edged sword” for those nations. We showed data validating that developing countries that export oil do not grow more than those who import it, they grow less. This was a surprising find at the time, but has almost become common knowledge since then. We explained that exports of resources, principally petroleum, could be a curse rather than a blessing. This policy-based book contains also theoretical models showing the increased wealth divide that would occur between North the industrial nations which export under increasing returns to scale conditions-- and South-- the developing nations that export mostly resources and labor intensive products with decreasing returns to scale.

At the end of the 1980’s, a number of articles on trade and increasing returns to scale showed that increasing returns to scale on their own explain why countries trade—to benefit from increased markets. I used this to explain the emergence of ‘trading blocks’ and the extent to which trading blocks can be viewed as a step towards the liberalization of trade rather than a step towards isolation and trade wars between trading blocks.

Topology and Social Choice -- Social Diversity

A stroke of luck led me in 1977 to find a geometric explanation for the mysterious “social choice paradox’ that Kenneth Arrow had presented in the 1950’s as part of his own PhD dissertation at Columbia. This finding led to a complete resolution for the first time for the “social choice paradox”, namely to a set of conditions which are both necessary and sufficient for a resolution of the social choice paradox that Arrow had found. My insight identified the problem as being geometrical in nature, using algebraic topology tools as I had done in 1977 with my PhD dissertation in Mathematics. In economic terms I was able to demonstrate that the problem of social choice could be viewed simply as one derived from excessive social diversity. There is a precise degree of social diversity that allows a solution to the social choice paradox. Beyond that, there is no solution.

Social diversity of course is a good feature of the economy — as it allows gains from trade. But my results showed that there is a limit, that beyond a certain point it renders voting systems dysfunctional.

These new results were very satisfactory for me. While I had worked with Kenneth Arrow and greatly respected his brain and his wonderful results, in truth I could never understand the ‘structure’ of his paradox of social choice, which he had presented in a combinatorial fashion. Arrow’s combinatorial results were unclear to me. The entire literature following Arrow’s lead was combinatorial, while I could only ‘see’ geometrical structures and spatial representations.

The breakthrough for me occurred in 1977, while I was advising the United Nations and after a seminar that I presented at the Bell Labs, in a division led by Elizabeth Bailey who was interested in hiring me at that point. I came upon a response to a question by Robert Willig, now at Princeton, which led me to the creation of a topological explanation for the problems of social choice. This led eventually to my article “Social Choice and the Topology of Spaces of Preferences” published in an MIT journal edited by the late mathematician Gian Carlo Rota, Advances in Mathematics, in 1980, and to a number of other articles that used the first result to explain a lot of what had been unclear in the field. New results emerged that could not be obtained before, I suspect, because the right mathematical infrastructure was not available until then. Somewhat unexpectedly, Rota himself was a great specialist in combinatorial mathematics.

As a follow-up to this discovery, I published another mathematics article “Intersecting Families of Sets and the Topology of Cones in Economics” in 1994, in the leading Mathematics journal, Bulletin of the American Mathematical Society, edited at that time by the excellent mathematician Richard Palais. Here I showed, somewhat surprisingly, that the basic structure of the most important forms of resource allocation was connected with that of the social choice paradox that Kenneth Arrow had pioneered. The same mathematical structure was also the cause of problems of market equilibrium as well as the ‘core’ in game theory. Surprisingly, the common root of all these problems is the issue of when sets intersect, and in economic terms this measures once again social diversity. This is the key issue in finding a solution to market equilibrium, for social choices and for game solutions.

In this work I showed with Geoffrey Heal the first necessary and sufficient conditions for the existence of social choice rule. By myself I showed later a rather surprising result: that the same condition is necessary and sufficient for the existence of market equilibrium, the core and social choice—unexpectedly, it is the same conditions in the three cases. Social diversity holds the key. Beyond a certain point, it prevents the economy from reaching market equilibrium, a core solution or social choice rules. This validates the key role of diversity in allowing gains from trade, while at the same time limiting most forms of resource allocation beyond a certain point.

Topology and Innovation

The initial insights to resolve the social choice problem were followed up in a series of several articles in the Journal of Mathematical Economics, Economic Letters, and in Social Choice and Welfare. Later on in 1986 I published necessary and sufficient conditions for the resolution of the paradox in Journal of Economic Theory with Geoffrey Heal. To everyone’s surprise, my 1980 discovery focused on a topological ‘obstruction’ that has to be removed for appropriate voting to be possible. This ‘obstruction’ is an object from algebraic topology —an area that was that of my first work in Mathematics where I looked at the geometry of the Universe. The ‘obstruction’ I discovered measures the degree of ‘social diversity’ of the population. This concept was developed in some detail many years later in 1993, as discussed below. Recently PBS made a TV movie about my results, representing graphically the shapes of the ‘cones’ that define the invariant in beautiful color. These cones are, for me, an object of wonder.

More recently I refined this work with the introduction of a ‘topological invariant’ that decides when there is a solution to three problems simultaneously: the existence of market equilibrium social choice and the core of a game. It is called an ‘invariant’ because it does not depend on numerical measurements but rather on geometrical or topological shapes. This is important in economics or in other social choices where numerical measurements are often unreliable.

This convinced me that topology, and more particularly algebraic topology, are ideal tool for the social sciences. This is a point I had already made in a lecture I gave at Harvard University, “On the Foundations of Political Economy” organized by a great economist and friend Amartya Sen, in 1990. Since then a journal has emerged on the topic, SocioTopology, created in 2002, in which I act as an editor. I was not alone therefore in thinking that algebraic topology is the ‘tool of choice’ for the social sciences.

My newly created ‘topological invariant’ is based on the homology of a ‘nerve’ defined by a family of sets naturally associated to the economy. This mathematical construct was never used before in economics and appeared in my 1993 article in the Bulletin of the American Mathematical Society. The concept turned out to be too advanced for the mathematical tool kit of most economists so far, and it has not been widely used yet.

The 1980 results on social choice are some of my best-known work (together with Basic Needs) possibly because Arrow is an arbiter of this area and he is more flexible and open minded than most. My work on trade is perhaps more widely known, as the number of mathematical economists is much smaller than the number of international economists. Yet the mathematical sophistication of the field of international trade is lower than that of mathematical economics, and technological innovation in international trade is generally less well received. This could be considered somewhat of an understatement.

North-South Trade and the Global Environment

Soon after the results of “Intersecting Families of Sets and the Topology of Cones in Economics” appeared in Advances in Mathematics, I published in 1994 “North-South Trade and the Global Environment” in the American Economic Review (AER). Paul Milgrom of Stanford University, a great economist and a friend, acted as an editor and showed tremendous patience and intelligence in dealing with the innovation in that piece. The AER is of course a leading journal in economics, and my new article develops and generalizes my earlier work on international trade, clarifying the linkages between global markets and the problem of the global environment. This link underlies my earlier work in the Bariloche Model and on Basic Needs. The thesis of this new article is that difference in property rights for resources explains trade between nations. Since then this has become well known and accepted. In March 2003 I gave a series of lectures to a group of students from several Danish Universities and other Scandinavian countries at the University of Southern Denmark; to my surprise, all were familiar with my 1994 results, which they took almost to be almost ‘common knowledge’ within the environmental literature.

The 1994 articles “North-South Trade and the Global Environment,” and its ‘twin’ for the case of renewable resources “North-South Trade and the Dynamics of Renewable Resources,” show that differences in property rights for environmental resources predict why nations trade, and how. The North, the industrial countries, hold their resources as private property, while developing nations in the South treat resources as common property or even ‘open access’. I showed that this difference in property rights regimes between the North and the South by itself explains why those countries that are not particularly rich in natural resources end-up exporting resources to others who have more. It also explains the low international prices for resources. This creates over consumption of resources and lack of technological innovation in the North, and over exploitation of resources and poverty in the South. It is the main cause for today’s global environmental problems.

Overuse of the ‘global commons’ leads to global warming, which results from excess consumption of fossil fuels, and also to the biodiversity loss associated to the destruction of forests and watersheds ecosystems to grow cash crops or graze animals, in both cases for the international market. Export-led policies based on resources, under these conditions, benefit nobody. This article is a