James Tobin Quotes
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At the same time it offered the hope, as it still does, that improved understanding could better the lot of mankind. For me, growing up in the 1930s, the two motivations powerfully reinforced each other.
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According to the general equilibrium approach to monetary theory, the principal way in which financial policies and events affect aggregate demand is by changing the valuations of physical assets relative to their replacement costs.
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In economic surveys of households, many variables have the following characteristics: The variable has a lower, or upper, limit and takes on the limiting value for a substantial number of respondents. For the remaining respondents, the variable takes on a For the remaining respondents, the variable takes on a wide range of values above, or below, the limit.
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The central message is still that, as Keynes argued, fiscal policy is the answer to liquidity traps, financial or political. The arguments against fiscal policy in Japan, so far as I understand them are intellectually fallacious; they would receive failing grades in an undergraduate macro exam.
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I shall argue that Keynesian macroeconomics neither asserts nor requires nominal wage and/or price rigidity. It does assert and require that markets not be instantaneously and continuously cleared by prices.
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The rate of investment – the speed at which investors wish to increase the capital stock – should be related, if to anything, to q, the value of capital relative to its replacement cost.
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The miserable failures of capitalist economies in the Great Depression were root causes of worldwide social and political disasters.
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My father also happened to be an intellectual, as learned, literate, informed, and curious as anyone I have known. Unobtrusively and casually, he was my wise and gentle teacher.
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There is no reason to think that the impact of monetary policy will be captured in any single variable... , whether it is a monetary stock or a market interest rate.
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At the time, my personal research objectives were to provide Keynesian economics with more rigorous foundations and to tighten and elaborate the logic of macroeconomic and monetary theory.
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The greatest good fortune of my return to Cambridge in 1946 was that there, in the spring, I met Elizabeth Fay Ringo. We were married a few months later.
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I studied economics and made it my career for two reasons. The subject was and is intellectually fascinating and challenging, particularly to someone with taste and talent for theoretical reasoning and quantitative analysis.
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The historic terrain of macro-economic theory is the explanation of the levels and fluctuations of overall economic activity. Macro-economists have been especially interested in the effects of alternative fiscal, financial, and monetary policies.
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Most important, I have learned from my colleagues and students.
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From 1966 to 1970 I served as Chairman of the New Haven City Plan Commission.
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Yale places great stress on undergraduate and graduate teaching. I like teaching, and I do a lot of it.
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After the United States entered the war, I joined the Naval Reserve and spent ninety days in a Columbia University dormitory learning to be a naval officer.
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I was born in Champaign in 1918. From the neighborhood elementary and intermediate schools, I went to the University High School in the twin city, Urbana.
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I had, to be sure, been drawn into economics when the General Theory was an exciting revelation for students hungry for explanation and remedy of the Great Depression. At the same time, I was uncomfortable with several aspects of Keynes’ theory, and I sought to improve what would now be called the microfoundations of his macroeconomic relations.
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The crisis triggered a fertile period of scientific ferment and revolution in economic theory.