Published at: April 25, 2024
April 25, 2024
On Friday, April 12, the Dutch Prize for Political Economics was awarded to emeritus professor Lans Bovenberg. The prize was previously called the Pierson Medal, but was adopted by the Royal Society for Political Economy (KVS) due to the slavery involvement of its namesake.
The prize was named after Nicolaas Pierson, an economist and liberal politician who was president of De Nederlandsche Bank (DNB) in the nineteenth century, introduced the predecessor of the current mortgage interest deduction as Minister of Finance and headed the cabinet as Prime Minister around the turn of the century. -Pierson.
Pierson’s involvement in slavery came to light in a study by De Nederlandsche Bank (DNB) into its own role in the Dutch slavery past, conducted by Fatah-Black et al. (2022). This showed, among other things, that Pierson traded in cotton from the plantations and had repeatedly expressed positive views about the slavery situation in the southern United States, where he resided at the time. After returning to the Netherlands, Pierson also advocated gradual abolition of slavery and generous financial compensation for slave owners.
Due to the slavery findings, it becomes Mr. NG Pierson Fund dissolved by the board. The triennial lifetime achievement prize, which was first awarded to Jan Tinbergen in 1951, will be taken over by the KVS, as will the Pierson Chair for the History of Economic Science, which is currently held at Utrecht University by Marcel Boumans.
Lans Bovenberg was presented with the Dutch Prize for Political Economics by Klaas Knot, president of De Nederlandsche Bank, and Robert Dur, chairman of the board of the KVS, for his services to economics. Rick van der Ploeg, professor at the University of Oxford, delivered the laudatio, in which he noted, among other things, that Bovenberg, together with Theo Nijman, is one of the few living economists who can identify as ‘institution builder’ thanks to his involvement in the founding of the pension think tank Netspar. Bovenberg already received the Spinoza Prize in 2003, the highest scientific award in the Netherlands.
Literature
Fatah-Black, K., L. Lauret and J. van den Tol (2022) Serving the chain? The Dutch Bank and the last decades of slavery, 1814–1863. Leiden: University Press.
