著者

Robert W. Dimand

出版者

The Keynes Society Japan

雑誌

The Review of Keynesian Studies (ISSN:24356581)

巻号頁・発行日

vol.2, pp.22-45, 2020 (Released:2021-04-24)

参考文献数

72

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The Cowles Foundation for Research in Economics was, in the first decades after its establishment at Yale in 1955, closely associated with the Keynesian economics of James Tobin and his “Yale school” approach to monetary economics. Its predecessor, the Cowles Commission, was not at first Keynesian: a few papers on Keynes were presented at the Cowles summer conferences in Colorado in the late 1930s but Harold Davis’s Analysis of Economic Time Series (Cowles Monograph No. 7, 1941) dismissed Keynes’s General Theory in a footnote, focusing instead on theories of fluctuations as truly periodic cycles, including Jevons on sunspots. But in the 1940s Oskar Lange and Jacob Marschak took the lead at the Cowles Commission in promoting a distinctive formulation of Keynesianism: Keynesian economics as a small general equilibrium system of simultaneous equations suitable for guiding aggregate demand management. Key works were Lange’s 1938 articles and 1944 Cowles monograph on Price Flexibility and Employment, a joint paper that Lange and Marschak submitted to the Economic Journal responding to Keynes’s critique of Tinbergen, and Marschak’s Chicago lectures, published as Income, Employment and the Price Level (1951), as well as articles by Marschak’s doctoral students Franco Modigliani (1944) and Don Patinkin (1947 to 1949). This approach contrasted with the emphasis on fundamental uncertainty in Keynes’s 1937 QJE reply to reviews of his General Theory, but not with the system of four simultaneous equations in the concluding lecture of Keynes’s Michaelmas 1933 lectures (an approach that Keynes did not carry over into the General Theory). Lawrence Klein, author of The Keynesian Revolution (1946) and a 1950 Cowles monograph on Economic Fluctuations in the United States, was at Cowles 1944-47. This view of the Cowles Commission, after Marschak became research director in January 1943, as Keynesian but in a distinctive way differs from the interpretation by Philip Mirowski, “The Cowles Commission as an Anti-Keynesian Stronghold 1943-54” (2012).