Table Of ContentRECOLLECTIONS OF EMINENT ECONOMISTS
Volume 2
Recollections of
Eminent Economists
Volume 2
Edited by
J. A. Kregel
Professor of International Economics
Associate Director of the Bologna Center
The Johns Hopkins University School of
Advanced International Studies
M
MACMILLAN
© Banca Nazionale del Lavoro 1989
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First published 1989
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British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data
Recollections of eminent economists. Vol. 2
1. Economics, 1945-1980---biographies
I. Kregel, J.A. (Jan Allen), 1944-
330'.092'2
ISBN 978-1-349-09778-4 ISBN 978-1-349-09776-0 (eBook)
DOI 10.1007/978-1-349-09776-0
ISBN 978-0-333-46482-3 Two-volume set
Contents
Notes on the Contributors Vll
Acknowledgements xi
Editor's Introduction xiii
1 Peregrinations of an Economist and the Choice of his
Route 1
Franrois Perroux
2 My Work on International Monetary Problems 17
Fritz Mach/up
3 Aerial Roots 73
Paul Streeten
4 An Emigrant from a Developing Country:
Autobiographical Notes I 99
Nicholas Georgescu Roegen
5 Confessions of an Incurable Romantic 129
Irma Adelman
6 The Life of an Economist 149
Charles P. Kindleberger
7 Reflections on the Drive to Technological Maturity 163
W. W. Rostow
8 The Radical Reflections of an Applied Economist 197
Henry Phelps Brown
9 On the Career of a Microeconomist 209
William J. Baumol
10 A Fascination with Economics 235
Karl Brunner
vi Contents
11 Economics as a Public Good 257
Herbert Giersch
12 Better than Ploughing 279
James M. Buchanan
13 The Challenge of Macroeconomic Understanding 297
Edmond Malinvaud
Name Index 317
Vlll Notes on the Contributors
James M. Buchanan, born in 1919 in Tennessee. After directing the
Thomas Jefferson Center of Political Economy at the University of
Virginia from 1956--68 and founding the Center for the Study of
Public Choice at the Virginia Polytechnic Institute in 1969, he moved
the Center to George Mason University in 1983. The study of the
process of political decision making by means of economic analysis
now known as 'Public Choice' theory and of 'constitutional political
economy' earned him the Nobel Prize for Economics in 1986.
Nicholas Georgescu Roegen, born in Romania in 1906, studied at a
number of institutions in Europe and the US before he returned to an
academic and governmental career in his home country where he
remained in the post-war period as Secretary General of the Ruma
nian Armistice Commission. He left Romania in 1948 for Harvard
and became Professor at Vanderbilt University the following year
and became emeritus professor in 1976. Early study in statistics and
business cycles was followed by influential work in consumer theory,
dynamic theory and environmental economics. He is perhaps best
known for his introduction of the concept of entropy into economic
analysis.
Herbert Giersch, born in Germany in 1921, has recently retired as
President of the influential Institute of World Economics in Kiel
where he was also Professor of Economics. His work in economic
growth and planning led to positions in international organisations
such as the OECD and membership in the German Federal Repub
lic's Council of Economic Experts (known as the 'wise men') from
1964-70. In 1969 he left his Professorship at the University of the
Saar which he had held since 1955 to take up his new posts in Kiel.
Charles P. Kindleberger, born in New York in 1910, spent his early
career in the US government and Federal Reserve Board. After
active involvement in the Marshall Plan he joined the MIT faculty in
1948 where he was Ford International Professor of Economics until
he became emeritus in 1976. He is best known for his development of
the interpretation of the post-war role of the US as a Bank providing
international intermediation and his 'top country' hypothesis of the
hierarchy of the international financial system. His recent work has
concentrated on international financial history.
Fritz Machlup, born in Austria, 1902-83. After leaving Austria in the
Notes on the Contributors ix
1930s he was Goodyear Professor at the University of Buffalo,
Hutzler Professor of Political Economy at the Johns Hopkins Uni
versity and in 1960 became Walker Professor of Economics and
Finance and Director of the prestigious International Finance Section
of Princeton University. After retiring in 1971 he was Professor at
New York University until his death in 1983. His substantial con
tributions to the academic literature were concentrated in the field of
international economics, but he also had great influence in methodol
ogy and what he called 'economic semantics'.
Edmond Malinvaud, born in France in 1923, has been in government
service at the National Institute for Statistics and Economic Studies
since 1946 where he has been Professor and Director of its School for
Statistics and Economic Management, as an economic adviser to the
Minister of Finance from 1972-4 and from 1974 as the Director
General of the Institute itself. He has also studied and taught as a
visiting Professor in · the US at the Cowles Commission and the
University of California at Berkeley. He came to international
prominence with the publication of his book on Statistical Methods of
Econometrics and his Lectures in Microeconomics. His recent re
search has produced three books dealing with the discussion of the
determination of unemployment within Walrasian and neo-Walrasian
general equilibrium models.
Fran~ois Perroux, born in 1903, played a major role in the post-war
development of French national accounts and budget planning as
founder and director of the Institute of Applied Economic Science
(ISEA) in 1944, which eventually became the Institute of Applied
Mathematical and Economic Sciences (ISMEA). Under his guidance
for nearly four decades the Institute was the most active and
innovative centre of economic research in France. During a univers
ity career which started in 1937, he held chairs in Lyon and at the
Sorbonne before being elected in 1955 to a chair in the College of
France from which he retired in 1975. From 1960-9 he was director of
the Institute for the study of the economic and social development
(IEDES). In addition to his work on planning and national accounts
his work has centred on a criticism of static general equilibrium
theory and the formulation of a generalised equilibrium approach
based on dynamic modification of the environment.
Henry Phelps Brown, born in England 1906, was a Fellow of New
X Notes on the Contributors
College, Oxford from 1930--47 and then Professor of Labour Econo
mics at the London School of Economics until retiring in 1968. He is
known for his life-long study of the movement of money and real
wages and productivity, and the factors which determine them, over
long periods and their impact on industrial relations. Among his
best-known works are A Century of Pay (with M. Browne) 1968, and
The Inequality of Pay, 1977.
W.W. Rostow, born in New York in 1916, combined economics and
history to produce his well-known theory of the 'take-off' in his
rendering of the stages of economic development. He has also been
an adviser to a number of US governments, serving inter alia in the
National Security Council and the Department of State in the
Kennedy and Johnson administrations from 1961-9. His academic
career, which has included teaching at Columbia, Oxford and
Cambridge, was spent primarily at MIT. After leaving government
service in 1969 he became Rex G. Baker Jr. Professor of Political
Economy at the University of Texas in Austin.
Paul Streeten, born in Austria in 1917, has had a career in academic
and international institutions in both the United Kingdom and the US
since fleeing Austria in the 1930s. He was Fellow of Balliol College
from 1948-78, with the exception of a two-year period from 196~
when he became Professor of Economics and Acting Director of the
Institute of Development Studies in the University of Sussex. In 1968
he returned to Oxford and was Warden of Queen Elizabeth House
and Director of the Institute of Commonwealth Studies until 1979.
He has also been an adviser on development issues to the British
government, the World Bank and the International Labour Orga
nisation. Since 1983 he has been Professor of Economics and
Director of the World Development Institute of Boston University.
Acknowledgements
The 'Recollections of Eminent Economists' published in this volume
originally appeared in the following numbers of the Banca Nazionale
del Lavoro Quarterly Review:
Fran~ois Perroux, no. 133, June 1980, pp. 147--62; Fritz Machlup, no.
133, June 1980, 115--46 and no. 140, March 1982, pp. 3-36; Paul
Streeten, no. 157, June 1986, pp. 135-59; Irma Adelman, no. 166,
September 1988, pp. 243--62; Nicholas Georgescu Roegen, no. 164,
March 1988, pp. 3-32; Charles P. Kindleberger, no. 134, September
1980, pp. 231-45; W. W. Rostow, no. 161, June 1987, pp. 115-46. H.
Phelps Brown, no. 132, March 1980, pp. 3-14; William J. Baumol,
no. 147, December 1983, 311-35; K. Brunner, no. 135, December
1980, pp. 403-26; H. Giersch, no. 158, September 1986, pp. 251-73;
James M. Buchanan, no. 159, December 1986, pp. 359-76; Edmond
Malinvaud, no. 162, September 1987, pp. 219--38.
xi
