Charles Edward Lindblom (March 21, 1917 – January 30, 2018), Sterling professor emeritus of economics and political science at Yale University (1949 – 1987), past President of the American Political Science Association (1981), and former Director of Yale’s Institute for Policy Studies (1974-81), died at home in Santa Fe at age 100. He moved to Santa Fe in 2002. Throughout his career Lindblom pursued the troubled attempt of scholars, political leaders and ordinary citizens to understand the social world well enough to shape it. He was one of the early developers and advocates of the theory of policy and decision-making. From 1963-65 Lindblom served in India with the U.S. Agency for International Development, playing a part in India’s agricultural Green Revolution. His theory of incrementalism, introduced in his seminal paper, “The Science of Muddling Through” (1959), demonstrated the superiority in many circumstances of social organization and decision making through mutual adjustment among many participants, and became one of the most frequently cited publications in political science literature.
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