Yew-Kwang Ng


Yew-Kwang Ng is a professor of economics at Fudan University, Shanghai. He has published in a variety of academic disciplines, and is best known for his work in welfare economics.

Early life and education

Ng was born during WW2, in Japanese-occupied Malaya. While in high-school, he was drawn to studying economics because of his ambition to "establish communism in an independent Malaysia"; the Cultural Revolution in China and events in the Soviet Union later led Ng to change his mind about the viability of communism. Ng graduated with a Bachelor of Commerce from Nanyang University in 1966 and later a Ph.D. from Sydney University in 1971.

Career

During the 1980s, working as a columnist, Ng wrote in support of Deng Xiaoping's Chinese economic reforms. Ng has been a Fellow of the Academy of Social Sciences in Australia since 1981. He held a chair as professor of economics at Monash University between 1985 and 2012 and is now an emeritus professor. Between 2013 and 2019, Ng held the Winsemius chair at the Department of Economics at Nanyang Technological University. Since July 2019, Ng holds the position of Special Chair Professor at the School of Economics at Fudan University, Shanghai.

Research

Ng has written or co-authored more than 30 books and published more than two hundred refereed papers in economics and papers on biology, mathematics, philosophy, cosmology, psychology, and sociology. He proposed welfare biology as an academic discipline, stating that this has been his more underestimated contribution. He published his first academic paper in the Journal of Political Economy, one of the top five economics journals, while he was still an undergraduate student.

Economics

Ng is renowned for his work in welfare economics and a majority of his academic papers are in this area. He wrote his first book on the topic in 1979, Welfare Economics: Introduction and Development of Basic Concepts. Within welfare economics he is particularly known for his work on the theory of the third best, social choice theory and happiness economics. In many publications he defends a view of utility as being both cardinally measurable and interpersonally comparable.
Ng coined the term 'mesoeconomics' and helped establish the field as a simplified, tractable general-equilibrium analysis with both micro and macro elements. As a method it is used to study the implications of imperfect competition on the macroeconomy. It has been argued that mesoeconomics "typically yields conclusions that are consistently more closely aligned with empirical evidence than any of the competing macroeconomic models."
Ng contributed to the development of the new field of inframarginal economics, which "provides an analytical framework to reconcile the focus of neoclassical economics on distribution with the preoccupations of classical economists regarding the division of labour." He collaborated with Xiaokai Yang on this topic and in 1993 they published the joint book Specialization and Economic Organization: A New Classical Microeconomic Framework, which was said to have "credibly challenged Neoclassical Economics".

Moral philosophy

In moral philosophy, Ng advocates for the consequentialist position of hedonistic utilitarianism. He has defended this view in various academic papers, some of which were jointly written with the utilitarian moral philosopher Peter Singer. He also argues for this position in his 2000 book Efficiency, Equality, and Public Policy.
Thanks to his early work on animal welfare, global catastrophic risks and the measurement of wellbeing, he is credited with originating many ideas that would later be incorporated into the philosophy of effective altruism. In a 2020 paper, Ng analyses the implications of the economic theory of the second best for effective altruism, arguing that we live in a "third best" world where informational and administrative constraints prevent us from realising the second best outcomes.

Controversies

In 2020, Ng provoked controversy when he wrote a column which suggested legalizing polyandry could be an option for China to solve its demographic crisis, caused by its low birthrate and the number of men considerably outweighing the number of women, stating "I wouldn't suggest polyandry if the gender ratio was not so severely imbalanced" and suggesting that it wouldn't be a problem for women to serve the physical needs of multiple husbands because "t's common for prostitutes to serve more than 10 clients in a day"; Ng intends to follow this column with one supporting the legalization of brothels, arguing that "a man’s right to achieving sexual satisfaction is being severely violated if legal sex work is not allowed." On the Chinese Internet, his column went viral and his views were criticized by a number of women, one stating that "he wants to legalize sex slaves".

Awards and honours

Ng has received a number of awards in recognition of his work. In 2007, he was made a Distinguished Fellow of the Economic Society of Australia, the highest award that the Society bestows. In the tribute associated with the award he was described as "one of Australia's most important and best internationally known economists." According to Economics Nobel Laureate Kenneth Arrow, Ng is "one of the leading economic theorists of his generation" and Nobel Laureate James Buchanan credited him to have "made major contributions in theoretical Welfare Economics."
After Ng's retirement from Monash University, he was recognised as a "honorary and adjunct appointment" by the Department of Economics. Given Ng's interest in global priorities research, he is on the advisory board of the Global Priorities Institute at the University of Oxford.

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