Nicholas Kaldor (Great Thinkers in Economics)

This book explores the life and work of Nicholas Kaldor, examining the influences that shaped and inspired his writings, and looks in detail at the crucial part he played in twentieth-century economics. Offering a comprehensive intellectual portrait of Kaldor, this book explains this great economist's importance in his own time and in ours. Nicholas Kaldor spent his childhood in Hungary before settling in London and absorbing the influences of Hayek and Keynes, among others. By the end of the 1930s, he had risen to the peak of his profession, and his work on equilibrium, welfare economics, trade cycles, growth theory, and the economics of 'total war' were seminal. His wartime writings influenced the creation of the huge social democratic majority that resulted in the Labour landslide of 1945, and his work on postwar reconstruction looked forward to the possibility of a genuinely new and better form of society. In 1949 Kaldor moved to Cambridge and was one of the architects of the post-Keynesian growth and distribution theory. The decades after the Second World War saw Kaldor play a central part in British economic policy. In the 1980s he proved to be a powerful opponent of monetarism, and his arguments found an audience both inside and outside the economics profession. This book explores the life and work of Nicholas Kaldor, examining the influences that shaped and inspired his writings and opinions, and looking in detail at the crucial part he played in twentieth-century economics, from both a theoretical and a policy perspective. Offering a comprehensive intellectual portrait, the book explains this great economist's importance in his own time and in ours Front Matter....Pages i-viii An Economist from Hungary....Pages 1-15 Not the Devil’s Decade....Pages 16-35 Kaldor’s War....Pages 36-57 A Return to Theory....Pages 58-80 The British Economic Disaster, 1964–1979....Pages 81-109 Kaldor and the Third World....Pages 110-133 The Scourge of Monetarism....Pages 134-159 The Irrelevance of Equilibrium Economics....Pages 160-183 Kaldor in His Time — and Ours....Pages 184-200 Back Matter....Pages 201-250