Charles Blackorby, known as Chuck, grew up in Pembina, ND, a small town on the Canadian border. After obtaining a B.A. from Harvard in 1963, he completed his Ph.D. at Johns Hopkins in 1967. Kelvin Lancaster was his thesis supervisor. Chuck had academic appointments at the University of California, Santa Barbara (1967–1970), the London School of Economics (1970–1972), Southern Illinois University, Carbondale (1972–1975), the University of British Columbia (1974–2002), and the University of Warwick (2002–2010). He was an Associate Member of GREQAM in Marseille since 1989 and a CIREQ Associate Research Fellow in Montreal since 2001. Upon retirement, he and his wife, the economist Margaret Slade, returned to live in Vancouver.
Chuck received numerous awards and distinctions. He was a Fellow of the Econometric Society, a Fellow of the Canadian Economics Association, a Killam Prize Laureate, and the recipient of the Jacob Bieley Award from the University of British Columba. He served as President of the Canadian Economics Association in 2000–2001. Chuck delivered the Innis Lecture at the CEA’s annual meeting in 1990 and the Arrow Lecture at the meeting of the Society for Social Choice and Welfare in 2004.
Chuck published over 100 articles in journals and edited volumes, two monographs, and one co-edited volume. His journal articles most frequently appeared in Econometrica, the Journal of Economic Theory, the Review of Economic Studies, the Journal of Public Economics, Social Choice and Welfare, the International Economic Review, and the Canadian Journal of Economics.
Chuck enjoyed working with colleagues, with the consequence that he had a rather large number of co-authors. Particularly long-lasting collaborations were those with Bob Russell and Dan Primont, who he met while teaching in Santa Barbara, and with David Donaldson and Walter Bossert that began during his time at U.B.C. Donaldson was his most frequent co-author. Bill Schworm and John Weymark also wrote a number of articles with him.
Terence Gorman was an important early influence on Chuck’s research. He and Tony Shorrocks co-edited The Collected Works of W. M. Gorman: Volume I (Oxford University Press, 1995). This collection includes editorial commentaries on the papers, a number of which had not previously been published.
Chuck was a microeconomic theorist. His early research focused on duality, separability, aggregation, functional structure, and dynamic consistency, topics that he on occasion later returned to. Chuck had a passionate interest in ethical issues, which is reflected in the fact that most of his publications after his arrival at U.B.C. were devoted to normative economics. In particular, he made major contributions to social choice theory, welfare economics, the measurement of inequality and poverty, the theoretical foundations and practical implementation of interpersonal comparisons of well-being, and population ethics. His work on welfare economics was wide ranging, addressing issues related to intergenerational equity, cost-benefit analysis, risk-benefit analysis, rational choice, and optimal tax and expenditure theory. On occasion, Chuck’s research took him further afield, with contributions to topics ranging from general and partial equilibrium theory to international economics.
Soon after completing his Ph.D., Chuck became well-known for his fundamental contributions showing how duality theory can be employed to determine the functional structure implications of alternative separability assumptions, particularly in the context of consumer theory and producer theory. Much of this research was conducted with Primont and Russell and summarized in their joint book, Duality, Separability, and Functional Structure: Theory and Economic Applications (North–Holland, 1978). This volume is the authoritative monograph on this subject and is a must-read for anyone who contemplates working on these issues. Later, he built on this research in a series of articles with Schworm, including three that deal with aggregate measures of capital. This early research on separability and functional structure subsequently played an important role in Chuck’s work on social choice and welfare economics.
Chuck’s 1984 Journal of Public Economics article, "Social Criteria for Evaluating Population Change," written with Donaldson initiated the burgeoning subfield of formal population ethics. In this literature, the tools of social choice and welfare economics are used (i) to identify criteria for socially evaluating alternatives that involve variable population sizes and (ii) to apply these criteria to concrete problems in which the actions taken affect the number of people or sentient beings who exist. The 1984 article is notable for the introduction of a novel utilitarian class of variable-population social-evaluation criteria –-critical-level utilitarianism––that avoids some flaws inherent in average and total utilitarianism. This class has been extensively studied in the subsequent literature. Beginning in the early 1990s, Blackorby and Donaldson joined forces with Bossert to write a series of papers on formal population ethics. Most of their work on this topic has been synthesized in Population Issues in Social Choice Theory, Welfare Economics, and Ethics (Cambridge University Press, 2005). This volume is known for its innovative contributions to the field, its rigor, and its philosophical sophistication. This monograph, and many of Chuck’s other writings on normative issues, have received a great deal of attention from philosophers, not just from economists.
Full justice cannot be done to Chuck’s wide-ranging scholarly accomplishments here, so only brief mention is made of three other topics to which he has made significant contributions. With Donaldson, he wrote a number of important articles on the normative approach to inequality and poverty measurement. The first of them, "Measures of Relative Equality and Their Meaning in Terms of Social Welfare" (Journal of Economic Theory, 1978), opened up new paths of investigation that were, by and large, neglected until the time it appeared.
Chuck also wrote a number of highly cited papers on social choice theory when it is assumed that some form of interpersonal utility comparison is possible. His article with Donaldson and Weymark, "Social Choice with Interpersonal Utility Comparisons: A Diagrammatic Introduction" (International Economic Review, 1984), has been used in textbooks to introduce this subject.
In his article with Schworm and Tony Venables, "Necessary and Sufficient Conditions for Factor Price Equalization" (Review of Economic Studies, 1993), a long-standing issue in the international trade literature was finally resolved. While most previous publications on this topic confine themselves to the formulation of sufficient conditions for factor price equalization, this article provides a clear-cut answer to the question how far the search for progressively weaker sufficient conditions can go by providing sufficient conditions that are also necessary
Chuck played a major role in turning the U.B.C. Economics Department into one of the top 20 departments in the world. His unconditional support and encouragement to countless junior members of our community, whether or not they were his own colleagues or students, deserves recognition. With his sonorous voice and outgoing personality, Chuck had a commanding presence. Those that knew him well have had the pleasure and privilege of benefiting from his immense generosity and, most importantly, from his invaluable friendship.
Walter Bossert (Université de Montréal), John A. Weymark (Vanderbilt University)
