University of Chicago economics professor Lester Telser dies

Lester Telser was a University of Chicago economics professor whose research was focused on a concept known as core theory, which studies how groups of people cooperate with one another to maximize their advantage.

“He was a University of Chicago scholar in the best tradition,” said Nobel Prize-winning U. of C. economics professor James Heckman, a longtime colleague. “He was pure as (the) driven snow, and was deeply committed to research and ideas and imposed the highest standards on himself and his colleagues.”

Telser, 91, died of natural causes Sept. 3 at the University of Chicago Hospitals, said his son, Joshua. A Hyde Park resident since 1961, Telser had battled lymphoma since 1994, his son said.

Born in Chicago, Telser grew up in the Humboldt Park and Hyde Park neighborhoods, graduating from Hyde Park High School. He received a bachelor’s degree from Roosevelt University in 1951 and studied economics for a year at Harvard University.

He went on to get his master’s and doctoral degrees from the U. of C., where one of his advisers for his doctoral thesis, which focused on financial futures markets, was noted economist Milton Friedman.

Telser briefly taught economics at what now is Iowa State University and served in the Army before joining U. of C.’s graduate business school as an economics professor. After a year as a visiting fellow at a foundation for economics research at Yale, he returned to the U. of C. as a professor in the university’s economics department, where he remained until his retirement in 1997.

Harlow Higinbotham, managing director of NERA Economic Consulting and a former student, recalled Telser’s “ever-present sense of humor, his almost childlike enthusiasm for traditional microeconomics and the Chicago School way of thinking, and his unyielding patience as a mentor and teacher.”

Victor Lima, a former graduate student of Telser’s who now is a senior instructional professor of economics at the U. of C., recalled Telser as an academic with multiple intellectual interests beyond economics and a strong belief that economists should place their work in the proper historical context. Lima also said Telser was critical to his development as an academic.

“He was engaged in lively academic debate with his colleagues until a few months before his passing, and I was always excited to read his papers because he always had an insightful point to make that would invariably make me think about a topic I thought I understood well in a different light,” Lima said.

In his research, Telser took an interest in industrial organization, financial futures markets and forward markets. However, colleagues said his life’s work was on core theory, which propounds that individuals can and do band together to advance their interests as much as possible. After publishing numerous papers on the subject, Telser authored a book on core theory in 2006.

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Core theory “has an undeserved reputation of being too abstract … (and) is a highly flexible way of looking at practical economic problems, especially problems in industrial organization,” Telser wrote in a 1994 article in the Journal of Economic Perspectives.

“He went into game theory at a time when it was ruled as irrelevant by his senior colleagues in the department (and) he developed cooperative game theory at a time that was unfashionable,” Heckman said. “His work on futures markets, dynamic optimization and econometrics broke new ground and influenced the scholars who built on it in fundamental ways.”

After retiring, Telser continued to write scholarly articles, and he also enjoyed classical music and the opera, Lima said.

Telser’s wife of 64 years, Sylvia, died in 2020. In addition to his son, Telser is survived by a daughter, Tamar Schwartz; a brother, Alvin; and two grandchildren.

Services were held.

Goldsborough is a freelance reporter.

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