The following autobiographical remarks by James Tobin were circulated among the University of Chicago faculty before its Monday, February 13, 1950 meeting. After discussing the “Old Business” of the Committee Report on Ph. D. Thesis requirements and Departmental policy on library acquisitions, a third item added by hand to the mimeographed agenda was “C. Appointment (Tobin)”.
Cf. the Search Committee report on Tobin from Columbia University, also from 1950.
Robert Dimand has recently published the book James Tobin in the Palgrave Macmillan series Great Thinkers in Economics.
A list of major works and Tobin-related links are at the Gonseca History of Economic Thought Website.
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If you find this posting interesting, here is the complete list of “artifacts” from the history of economics I have assembled. You can subscribe to Economics in the Rear-View Mirror below. There is also an opportunity for comment following each posting….
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TO: Professor T. W. Schultz
DATE: January 27, 1950
FROM: J. Marschak
Following our conversation on Tuesday, I attach 20 copies of the biography of James Tobin, with the request that they be circulated among the members of the Department.
Please note that Tobin’s article “Tax Measures to Encourage Saving” has been published in the meantime in the recent issue of the American Economic Review.
Sincerely yours,
Jacob Marschak
JAMES TOBIN. (Letter of April 2, 1949)
I was born March 5, 1918, in Champaign, Illinois, attended the local schools and the University of Illinois High School. I went to Harvard College on a National Scholarship and was graduated in 1939. I majored in economics in college, and did two years of graduate work in economics at Harvard 1939-41. I worked at Washington at OPACS and WPB from June 1941 to April 1942, when I went into the Navy and served as a line officer on a destroyer. I was “separated” in January 1946 and returned to Harvard to write a thesis. I was a part-time teaching fellow until I received the degree of Ph. D. I am married and have one child, aged 8 months.
I have indicated my training in economics in the previous paragraph: it is better than my mathematical background. In college I had two years of calculus, and as a graduate student I took a half-year course in mathematical statistics and a half-year course in mathematical economics. One of my chief occupations as a Junior Fellow has been to try to improve my mathematical equipment, by attending some courses and by independent work. I have studied advanced calculus, probability, differential equations, modern algebra.
Publications: “Note on the Money Wage Problem,” QJE, LV, 1941, 508-15. “The Role of Statistical Forecasts in Planning for Defense,” Public Policy, III, 1942, 197-223. “Liquidity Preference and Monetary Policy,” Rev. Ec. Stat., XXIX, 1947, 124-131. “Rejoinder” (to Clark Warburton, on same subject), ibid., XXX, 1948, 314-317. “Money Wage Rates and Employment,” in The New Economics, 572-587. “The Fallacies of Lord Keynes’ ‘General Theory’” (By Jaccques Rueff): Comment,” QJE, LXII, 1948, 763-770. A note on “Tax Measures to Encourage Saving” will be published in the AER later this year.
My thesis was entitled “A Theoretical and Statistical Analysis of Consumer Saving.” In it I attempted to derive a saving function by using both budget data and time series—a device suggested by you—and to bring in variables other than income: asset holdings, capital gains, price level. An article based on the thesis is promised for the projected volume in honor of John H. Williams. I am very much interested in the problems involved in obtaining statistical demand functions and am at present completing work on one for food, again using both budget data and time series.
Source: Hoover Institution Archives, Milton Friedman Papers, Box 79, Folder 2 “University of Chicago Minutes, Economics Department, 1949-1953”.
Image Source: Yale University Manuscripts & Archives. Digital Images Database. “James Tobin in war uniform (1945-December)”.