Richard R. Nelson (born 1930 in New York City) is an American professor of economics at Columbia University.
Nelson has cooperated with Erik Reinert and his heterodox economics network The Other Canon Foundation.
He argued that public policy progress was often hampered by the partial, and often faulty, conceptualisation of problems and solutions by the different decision-making parties.
Economists, public policy experts and technologists all understand problems within their own terms of reference, and thus challenge the validity of other perspectives.
[12] In 2005 he was awarded the Leontief Prize presented by the Global Development and Environment Institute at Tufts University.