Thomas Vietorisz
Thomas Vietorisz (born February 4, 1926 in Budapest, Hungary) is an American economist who specialized in urban planning. Education. Vietorisz completed his undergraduate studies at Budapest, Basel, and Zurich. In 1948, he received a Master of Science degree in Chemical Engineering and in 1956, a doctorate degree in economics from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). Career. Teaching. From 1963 to 1995, Vietorisz worked in the graduate faculty of The New School for Social Research in New York city. He held the position of department chair in 1977; senior lecturer from 1990 to 1994 and Professor Emeritus from  1995. Since 1996, he has been an adjunct Professor at Columbia University. Vietorisz also worked as an adjunct professor at Cornell University, Ithaca, New York from 1970 to 1973 and from 1977 onwards. Economics. Vietorisz worked in the field of applied and theoretical economics. An early example of his theoretical contribution is his method to quantize for priority ordering of projects in planning. Another example is his theory of "Decentralization in NonConvex System" that was highlighted in "Econometrica." The aim was to represent a two-level planning and decision-making system within the traditional Edgeworth box diagram, but extended for  non-convex analysis. An example of a practical suggestion Vietorisz makes is discussed in his challenge of the substitution-based theory for setting the US minimum wage which came under discussion in the forum of the journal "Challenge". In that forum, McCulloch raised the question as to where the other factors of production will come from to support an increase in the minimum wage. Vietorisz proposed that there were historic precedents to show that government-assisted loans were a possible source, and that in the case of the agricultural sector, there was no shortage of land since some was being  taken out of cultivation through subsidy programs. In short, McCulloch argued from the neoclassical perspective; Vietorisz, from the Dual Labor Market and Moral perspectives. The two different paradigms to view the issue of minimum wage are still being reconciled in the literature.