Yew-Kwang Ng

Yew-Kwang Ng (; English pronunciation or simply ; born August 7, 1942) is a Malaysian-Australian economist, who is currently Special Chair Professor of Economics at Fudan University, Shanghai, and a Distinguished Fellow of the Academy of the Social Sciences in Australia. He has published in a variety of academic disciplines and is best known for his work in welfare economics.
Life and work.
Yew-Kwang 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 the University of Sydney in 1971. During his studies at Nanyang University, amid the unrest of demonstrations and strikes, Ng came close to being arrested or expelled several times.
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 the 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. In 2018, Ng delivered the inaugural Atkinson Memorial lecture at the University of Oxford, dedicated to the memory of Sir Tony Atkinson. Since July 2019, Ng holds the position of Special Chair Professor at the School of Economics at Fudan University, Shanghai. He is also a columnist for the Chinese business news NetEase Finance online portal.
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.
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 an "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.
Politics.
Ng has stated that "trying to avoid excessive inequality [is] a very important issue, and likely the third most important public issue after environmental protections and peacekeeping". He is also a proponent of generous immigration policies, stating that "immigrants bring in factors complementary to the local ones and make the economy more vibrant".
In 2020, Ng wrote a column which suggested that allowing polyandry could be a way for China to reduce problems arising from the male-skewed gender ratio in the country. Ng also stated his intention to write a follow-up column discussing the pros and cons of legalizing prostitution. The column went viral and attracted heavy criticism online; many critics said that Ng's arguments were misogynistic and offensive, while others objected to polyandry as contrary to traditional marriage.
Philanthropy.
In 2015, Ng offered to match all donations to up to $25,000 to the charity organization Animal Ethics, a nonprofit organization aiming to promote animal ethics and to provide information and resources for animal advocates.
At the Nanyang Technological University Chinese Heritage Centre's Mid-Autumn Festival charity auction in 2016, Ng and his wife donated , which went towards the purchase of a painting by Master Yang Bailiang, a Chinese artist, which Ng donated to the centre and is now on permanent display.