Charles -Chuck- Blackorby passed away in September 2026, after a long and discreet retirement from academic life that began in 2010, at the end of an impressive academic career that had started as early as 1967, following the completion of his PhD at Johns Hopkins University under the supervision of Kelvin Lancaster.
His career took him, among other places, to the University of California, Santa Barbara, the London School of Economics, Southern Illinois University at Carbondale, and the University of British Columbia, where he spent twenty-eight years, before ending his career at the University of Warwick. Between 1989 and 2010, Chuck was also a very active associate member of GREQAM.
His research covered a remarkably wide range of topics in microeconomic theory. In particular, much of his work was concerned with the conditions under which the decisions of individual economic agents could be aggregated, either across individuals or across the different dimensions of their decisions — for example in the construction of consumption aggregates or price indices. These theoretical concerns naturally led him to make important contributions to duality theory in classical microeconomics, as well as to the theory of separability, which often makes aggregation possible. Duality, Separability, and Functional Structure: Theory and Economic Applications, the book he co-authored with Daniel Primont and R. Robert Russell (North-Holland, 1978), remains a major reference in the field.
His interest in aggregation also led him to explore a wide range of questions in social choice and normative economics, an area that came to occupy an increasingly important place in his research and to which he was deeply attached. Across these different fields, he published more than seventy articles in peer-reviewed journals, including fourteen in journals belonging to the discipline’s “Top Five”, as well as many others in leading journals such as the Journal of Economic Theory, the Economic Journal, and the International Economic Review. He had been a Fellow of the Econometric Society since 1988.
Chuck was a rigorous and passionate intellectual. All his work was driven by a concern to provide the models economists use to understand social reality with the foundations and logical consistency they require. He preferred the careful examination of the structure of existing models to the construction of new ones. In this respect, he was perhaps as much a philosopher and mathematician as an economist, if such disciplinary distinctions have any real meaning.
He was also a warm, colourful, generous, and modest man who sought neither honours nor tributes. Despite invitations from me and from several other colleagues, he never wished to mark the end of his career with a conference or a ceremony, and he withdrew from academic life with the same discretion that characterised him.
I owe a large part of my intellectual formation to him. He was my PhD supervisor, my friend, and a great fellow traveller of GREQAM, whom many of us remember with affection. He loved Provence, where he owned a second home for many years, and spoke French very well, having learned it in the region.
He will be greatly missed.
So long, Chuck!
Nicolas Gravel