James Tobin
James Tobin
James Tobinwas an American economist who served on the Council of Economic Advisers and the Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System, and taught at Harvard and Yale Universities. He developed the ideas of Keynesian economics, and advocated government intervention to stabilize output and avoid recessions. His academic work included pioneering contributions to the study of investment, monetary and fiscal policy and financial markets. He also proposed an econometric model for censored endogenous variables, the well-known "Tobit model". Tobin...
NationalityAmerican
ProfessionEconomist
Date of Birth5 March 1918
CountryUnited States of America
The cost overruns for the Big Dig look outrageous to us now ... but many big projects of the past have cost much more than the original estimates, ... (But) cities really don't have much choice. Americans have chosen to live in cities; we have no choice but to keep them livable. And despite the enormous headaches that Bostonians are experiencing now ... in 20 years they're going to be proud as hell, because they'll have the most beautiful and livable downtown in the country.
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.
I just find Ammann so appealing ... so deliberate, so smart, a walk-the-walk kind of guy who did something he cared about so deeply, ... I kind of fell in love with that bridge, too -- in fact, with the whole suspension bridge form. It's just a beautiful, beautiful structure.
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.
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.
I think the filmmakers and I were interested in telling stories that weren't well known,
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.
From 1966 to 1970 I served as Chairman of the New Haven City Plan Commission.
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.
There was considerable danger they'd be forgotten and their contributions buried,
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.
The miserable failures of capitalist economies in the Great Depression were root causes of worldwide social and political disasters.
The crisis triggered a fertile period of scientific ferment and revolution in economic theory.