James Tobin : biography
James Tobin (March 5, 1918 – March 11, 2002) was an American economist who, in his lifetime, served on the Council of Economic Advisors 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 received the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences in 1981.
Outside of academia, Tobin was widely known for his suggestion of a tax on foreign exchange transactions, now known as the "Tobin tax". This was designed to reduce speculation in the international currency markets, which he saw as dangerous and unproductive.
Life and career
Early life
Tobin, published in Nobel Lectures. Economics 1981-1990, Editor Karl-Göran Mäler, World Scientific Publishing Co., Singapore, 1992 was born on March 5, 1918 in Champaign, Illinois. His father was Louis Michael Tobin, (b. 1899) a journalist working at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. His father had fought in World War I, was a member of the first Greek Organization at Illinois (Delta Tau Delta fraternity Beta Upsilon chapter), and was credited as the inventor of ‘Homecoming’. His mother, Margaret Edgerton Tobin (b. 1893), was a social worker. Tobin followed primary school at the University Laboratory High School of Urbana, Illinois, a laboratory school in the university’s campus.
In 1935, on his father’s advice, Tobin took the entrance exams for Harvard University. Despite no special preparation for the exams, he passed and was admitted with a national scholarship from the university. Here among the faculty he would meet Joseph Schumpeter, Alvin Hansen, Gottfried Haberler, Sumner Slichter, Seymour Harris, Edward Mason, Edward Chamberlin, John Kenneth Galbraith and Wassily Leontief. During his studies he first read Keynes’ The General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money, published in 1936. Tobin graduated summa cum laude in 1939 with a thesis centered on a critical analysis of Keynes’ mechanism for introducing equilibrium "involuntary" unemployment. His first published article, in 1941, was based on this senior’s thesis.Solow, Robert. (2004). "James Tobin", Proceedings of the American Philosophical Society vol. 148, no. 3
Tobin immediately started graduate studies, also at Harvard, earning his M.A. degree in 1940. His fellow graduate students included Paul Samuelson, Lloyd Metzler, Abram Bergson, Richard Musgrave and Richard M. Goodwin. In 1941, he interrupted graduate studies to work for the Office of Price Administration and Civilian Supply and the War Production Board in Washington, D.C.. The next year, after the United States entered World War II, he enrolled in the US Navy, spending the war as an officer on a destroyer. At the end of the war he returned to Harvard and resumed studies, receiving his Ph.D. in 1947 with a thesis on the consumption function written under the supervision of Joseph Schumpeter. in Lives of the Laureates, Seven Nobel Economists, Edited by William Breit and Roger W. Spencer, The MIT Press, Cambridge, Massachusetts, London, England, 1986 In 1947 Tobin was elected a Junior Fellow of Harvard’s Society of Fellows, which allowed him the freedom and funding to spend the next three years studying and doing research.
Academic activity and consultancy
In 1950 Tobin moved to Yale University, where he remained for the rest of his career. He joined the Cowles Foundation, which moved to Yale in 1955, also serving as its president between 1955–1961 and 1964-1965. His main research interest was to provide microfoundations to Keynesian economics, with a special focus on monetary economics. In 1957 he was appointed Sterling Professor at Yale.
