On the morning of May 29, the third lecture of the Song Zexing Overseas High-end Lecture Series was held at the Academic Lecture Hall of the Puhe Campus Administration Building of Liaoning University. Professor Peter Lindert, a renowned economic historian from the University of California, Davis, was invited to give an academic lecture entitled “Making Social Spending Work”. He is an outstanding professor of economics, a visiting professor at the University of Essex, and a research fellow at the National Bureau of Economic Research in the United States. Professor Yu Miaojie, a member of the 14th National People’s Congress and a member of the Standing Committee of the 14th People’s Congress of Liaoning Province, who is also the Deputy Secretary of the CPC Committee and President of Liaoning University, attended the lecture and delivered a welcome speech. The conference was chaired by Professor Ma Xiangjun, the Vice Dean of the Research Institute of Chinese Economy of Liaoning University.
Professor Peter Lindert’s insightful lecture centered on how social spending, such as public education, healthcare, housing, pension and poverty reduction programs, can play a vital role in achieving economic growth and promoting income equality. Lindert’s analysis indicates that social spending did not have a negative impact on GDP in large welfare states in Northern and Eastern Europe, but rather contributed to equality and increased lifespan in a variety of ways. Lindert also argues that global governments must allocate more of their social budgets towards the young rather than the elderly. He notes that Southern Europe and Latin America’s initiatives on pensions for senior citizens are prone to misconceptions, and that Japan is also struggling with aging issues. Lindert concluded by stating that throughout global history, the greatest failure of social spending has been shown to lie in inadequate investment in the younger generation, especially with regards to public education. Despite most countries making progress in public education, East Asia and North America must improve their education programs for children, especially those under six years old. During the lecture, Professor Lindert had exchanges with the attending faculty members and students, patiently answering their questions.
At the end of the conference, Professor Yu Miaojie presented Professor Peter Lindert with the appointment letter of “Lifetime Honorary Professor of Liaoning University” and a commemorative disc of the “Song Zexing Overseas High-end Lecture Series” on behalf of the university. Representatives from the Faculty of Economics also presented Lindert with the university badge and flowers, and the participants took a group photo together.
The conference was hosted by the Faculty of Economics of Liaoning University and organized by the School of Economics and the International Exchanges Department of Liaoning University. More than 500 representatives, including senior officials, faculty members and students from the Schools under the Faculty of Economics, attended the conference.
Professor Peter Lindert: biography
Peter Lindert, a well-known economic historian in the United States, is a distinguished economic professor at the University of California, Davis, and a visiting professor at the University of Essex in the UK. He is also a researcher at the National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER) in the United States and has previously served as the president of the Economic History Association in the US.
Lindert’s research mainly focuses on economic history and public economics. He has published numerous academic papers in prestigious international economic journals such as Journal of Economic History, Explorations in Economic History, Economic History Review, and Journal of Public Economics. His research centers on the reasons and impacts of modern fiscal redistribution, the history of inequality, political discourse, and economic growth. His representative works include Growing Public: Social Spending and Economic Growth since the Eighteenth Century (2004), Unequal Gains: American Growth and Inequality since 1700 (2016, co-authored with Jeffrey Williamson), and Making Social Spending Work (2021), all of which are award-winning works. Growing Public was the best book on social science history at that time and won the Allan Sharlin Award in 2005.
Due to his outstanding achievements in teaching and scientific research in higher education, Lindert has received numerous honors. He was awarded the “Can” Honor by the Measurement Society in 1992-1993 (similar to the Academy Awards in the film industry). In 1994, he won the first Thomas Mayer Award for Excellence in Economics Teaching. In 1995, he was awarded the Distinguished Teaching Award of the Academic Senate of the University of California, Davis. In 1999, he won the UC Davis Prize of the University of California, Davis.
For his outstanding contributions to European economic history and outstanding performance in the teaching of economic history, Lindert became a joint winner of the Georgi Range Award. He was awarded the Jonathan Hughes Prize by the Economic History Association in 2007. He won the Galman-Park Data Set Creating Lifetime Contributions Award from the Economic History Association with Jeffrey G. Williamson in 2019. The award was to recognize outstanding works in global, African, Asian, Australian, and/or South American economic history in 2019.
Professor Lindert was granted a PhD degree from Cornell University in February 1967. He served as a professor of economics at the University of Wisconsin from 1977-1978, a professor at the Economics Department of the University of Cambridge in 1978, a visiting professor of economics at Harvard University from 1986-1987, and has been a distinguished economic professor at the University of California, Davis since 2003.
