Alfred S. Eichner (March 23, 1937February 10, 1988) was an American post-Keynesian economist who challenged the neoclassical price mechanism and asserted that prices are not set through supply and demand but rather through mark-up pricing. Eichner is one of the founders of the post-Keynesian school of economics and was a professor at Rutgers University at the time of his death. Eichner's writings and advocacy of thought, differed with the theories of John Maynard Keynes, who was an advocate of government intervention in the free market and proponent of public spending to increase employment. Eichner argued that investment was the key to economic expansion. He was considered an advocate of the concept that government incomes policy should prevent inflationary wage and price settlements in connection to the customary fiscal and monetary means of regulating the economy. He is noted for his book The Megacorp and Oligopoly (1976), Toward a new economics: essays in post-Keynesian and institutionalist theory (1985). His Macrodynamics of Advanced Market Economies (1987) contains chapters on dynamics and growth, investment, finance and income distribution. Life and work Eichner was born in Washington, D.C., in the United States. He received his doctorate in economics from Columbia University. He taught at Columbia from 1962 until 1971. Later he taught at SUNY Purchase (1971–1980), and then joined the Rutgers University faculty. Some books edited by Eichner include A Guide to Post-Keynesian Economics, Why Economics Is Not Yet a Science, and The Macrodynamics of Advanced Market Economies. Eichner testified before Congressional and other legislative committees Historian of culture and of economics Together with Eli Ginzberg, a professor of economics at Columbia, Eichner authored an economic history of African Americans, The Troublesome Presence: The American Democracy and the Negro, published in 1964. These co-authors wrote that... “of the several million persons who reached Great Britain’s North American colonies before 1776, it is conservatively estimated that close to 80 percent arrived under some form of servitude.” The science of economics? Some mainstream economists have argued that assumptions about the character of economic reality in the neoclassical economic paradigm are fundamentally flawed. Points arguably making a convincing case that the mathematical theories used by neoclassical economists cannot be viewed as scientific have consistently been made by trained economists. Alfred Eichner in Why Economics Is Not Yet a Science offers the following commentary on the discipline of economics as a social system: ....'The refusal to abandon the