James Tobin

Beginning with keynes at harvard

Rare is the child , I suspect who wants to grow up to be an economist , or a professor . I grew up in a university town and went to a university run high school , where most of my friend were faculty kids . I was so unfailing an A students that it was boring even to me . But I don't recall thinking of an academic career . I liked journalism , my father's occipation ; I had put out "newpapers" of my own from age six . I though of law : I loved to argue , and beginning in my teens I was fascinated by politics . I guess I knew that there was econoics at the university , but I didn't know what the subject really was . Of course , economic issues were always coming up in classes on history and goverment - civics , in thosedays . I expected economics to be among the social science course I would someday take in college, probably part of the pre-law curriculum .

  I grew up happily assuming I would go to college in my hometown , to the University of Illinois . One month before I was scheduled to enroll as a freshman , I was offered and accepted a Conant Prize Fellowship at a voracious reader , the biggest customer of the Champaign Public Library , discovered in the New York Times that Harvard was offering two of these new fellowships in each of five midwestern states . President Conant wanted to broaden the geographical and social base of Harvard College . Having nothing to lose , I accepted my father's suggestion that I apply . University High School , it turned out , had without even trying prepared me superbly for the obligatory College Board Exams . uni High graduates only third to thirty-five persons a year , but it has three Nobels to its credit and , once I had broken the ice , many national scholarships .
  Thus James Bryant Conant , Louis Michael Tobin , and Universit High School changed my life and carrerr , Illionois was and is great university . But I doubt that it would have led me into economics . For several reasons , Harvard did .
  Harvard was the leading academic center of economics in north America at the time : only Columbia and Chicago were close competitors . Both its senior and junior  faculty were outstanding . Two of the previous lecturers in this series were active and influential members of the community when I was a student , Wassily Leontief on the faculty and Paul Samuelson as a Junior Feloow , a graduate student free of formal academic requirements . Of the senior faculty of the 1930s , Joseph Schumpeter wuld have been a sure bet for a Nobel , Alvin Hansen , Edward Chamberlin , and Gottfried haberler likely choices . Haberler , still active , remains a possibility . Naturally , Harvard attracted remarkably talented graduate students . That able undergraduates might go on to scholarly careers was taken for granted .

  When I arrived at harvard , I knew I would want to major - at Harvard the word is concentrate - n one of the social sciences or possibly in mathematics . By the end of freshman year I was leaning to economics . But I hadn't yet taken any . In those days even Ec A , the introductory course , was considered too hard for freshman . As a sophomore all of eighteen years old , I began Ec A in a section taught by Spencer Pollard , an advanced graduate students specializing in labour economics and writing a dissertation on John L . Lewis and the United Mine Workers .

  Pollard was also my tutor . A Harvard  undergraduate , besides taking four courses , met regualarly , usually singly , with a turtor in his field of concentration , generally a faculty member or graduate student associated with the student's  residential house . Tutorial was not graded . It was modeled , like the house system itself , on Oxford and Cambridge . Pollard suggested that we devote our sessions to  " this new book from England ." He had recently been over there and judges  from the stir the book was creating even before publication that it was important . The book was the General Theory of Employment , Interest and Money by John Maynard Keynes , published in 1936 .