Not the Devil’s Decade

The Anglo-Irish journalist Claud Cockburn gave his memoir of the 1930s the title of The Devil’s Decade (Cockburn 1973). As a summary description of the state of the world in the 1930s this is hard to gainsay, but it cannot be applied to Nicholas Kaldor, who began the decade as an undergraduate student and ended it as one of the world’s leading young economic theorists. He was always a prolific writer. In Berlin, at the tender age of 19, he had worked as a stringer for the Budapest press, a practice he continued for a while after his move to London.1 By 1931 he was addressing dense three-page missives to John Maynard Keynes querying details of the argument in the Treatise on Money and eliciting a courteous, if rather frustrated, reply (Keynes 1987, pp. 238–42). Kaldor was also co-translator of Friedrich von Hayek’s extended critique of underconsumption theory, which was published in the LSE house journal, Economica, while still a research student (Hayek 1931). His own professional publications began in 1932 with a 12-page article on the Austrian economic crisis that Keynes had rejected for the Economic Journal but Kaldor managed to place in the Harvard Business Review (1932c). Over the next eight years he published 22 journal articles, 8 substantial book reviews and a translated book (again by Hayek).2