An American Keynesian

In September 1936, when James Tobin was an 18-year-old sophomore taking “Principles of Economics” (Ec A) at Harvard, his tutor, Spencer Pollard (a graduate student who was also the instructor of Tobin’s Ec A section) “decided that for tutorial he and I, mainly I, should read ‘this new book from England. They say it may be important.’ So I plunged in, being too young and ignorant to know that I was too young and ignorant” to begin the study of economics by reading Keynes’s The General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money (Tobin 1988, 662). Pollard was right: the book did turn out to be important, not least for its lasting role in shaping Tobin’s intellectual development. Tobin (1992, 1993) remained proud to call himself an “Old Keynesian” in contrast to New Keynesian, New Classical, and Post Keynesian, and, when Harcourt and Riach (1997) edited A “Second Edition” of The General Theory it was fitting that they invited Tobin (1997) to contribute the overview chapter, with the first part of the chapter written “as J. M. Keynes.”1 Although Sir John Hicks (1935, 1937, 1939) and Irving Fisher also influenced Tobin2, his approach to economics was always most deeply shaped by Keynes and by Tobin’s experience growing up during the Great Depression of the 1930s.