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Exam Questions Harvard Socialism Suggested Reading Syllabus

Harvard. Socialism and Planning. Syllabus and final exam. Tinbergen and Tsuru, 1957

 

During the spring term of 1957 at Harvard, two visiting professors jointly taught an undergraduate course on “Socialism and Planning”. The instructors were future (inaugural!) Nobel laureate, Professor Jan Tinbergen coming from the Netherlands School of Economics and Dutch Central Planning Bureau, and Harvard economics Ph.D. alumnus (1940), Professor Tsuru Shigeto of Hitotsubashi University (Tokyo).

The American-Japan Intellectual Interchange Committee invited Tsuru Shigeto to be a visiting lecturer for one year at Harvard University in 1956-57. In his March 26, 1957 testimony before the Subcommittee to Investigate the Administration of the Internal Security Act and Other Internal Security Laws of the Committee on the Judiciary of the United States Senate (his testimony will be included in the next post), Tsuru was asked “And what do you do, do you teach at Harvard?” and he answered “Under the terms of this invitation, my main job at Harvard is research. But I assist occasionally in a number of courses, to give sort of guest lectures.” This explains why both Tinbergen and Tsuru are listed on the course syllabus and final exam but only Tinbergen’s name appears in the annual report of the President of Harvard College.

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Course Enrollment

[Economics] 111a. Socialism. Professor Tinbergen (Netherlands School of Economics). Half course.

(S) Total 30: 14 Other Graduates, 5 Seniors, 7 Juniors, 4 Sophomores.

Source: Harvard University. Report of the President of Harvard College, 1956-1957, p. 68.

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HARVARD UNIVERSITY
Department of Economics

Economics 111a
Professors Tinbergen and Tsuru, Spring 1957

Socialism and Planning
Outline

I. Socialism
Feb. 4 (Tinbergen) Introductory and remarks on treatment of the subject
4 (Tinbergen) History of socialism: “utopian” and “scientific”
6 (Tsuru) History of socialism: “utopian” and “scientific” (cont.)
8,11 (Tinbergen) Types of socialist doctrines in the post-Marxian period (revisionism, Fabianism, etc.)
13, 15, 18 (Tsuru) Economic characteristics of socialism
20 (Tinbergen) Recent socialist policies:
(1) Wage policy
25 (Tinbergen) (2) Social insurance
27
Mar. 1		 (Tinbergen) (3) Socialization
4 (Tinbergen) (4) Anti-depression policy
6 (Tinbergen) (5) War-time regulations
8 (Tinbergen) (6) Regulations of agricultural markets
11 (Tinbergen) (7) Income distribution
13, 15 (Tsuru) (8) Recent socialist policies in the Soviet Union
18, 20 (Tsuru) (9) Recent socialist policies in mainland China
II. Planning
Mar. 22,25 (Tinbergen) Use made of planning since 1940 (also critique of free-pricing society)

27, 29

Apr. 8

 (Tinbergen) “Free” planning illustrated by The Netherlands
10, 12 (Tinbergen) Some points of planning for detailed control
15 (Tinbergen) Development planning: (1) Italy
17, 22 (Tsuru) Development planning: (2) India
24, 26 (Tsuru) “Planning vs. the law of value”

 

READINGS
*Obligatory reading.

Books

Cole, G. D. H., Socialist Economics, London, B. Gollancz Ltd., 1950.

Central Planning Bureau of the Netherlands: Scope and Methods of the Central Planning Bureau, The Hague, 1956.

Government of India: Second Five Year Plan, New Delhi, 1956.

Gray, A., The Socialist Tradition, Moses to Lenin, Longmans, Green & Co., 1947.

Harris, S. E., Economic Planning; The plans of fourteen countries with analyses of the plans, New York, Knopf, 1949.

J. Jewkes, Ordeal by Planning, London, Macmillan, 1948.

W. Keilhau, Principles of Private and Public Planning, London, Unwin Bros., 1951.

Lewis*, W. A., The Principles of Economic Planning, Washington, Public Affairs Press, 1951.

K. Mannheim, Man and Society in an Age of Reconstruction, Kegan Paul, Trench, Trubner & Co., London.

J. E. Meade, Planning and the Price Mechanism, London, Allen & Unwin, 1948.

H. Mendershausen, The Economics of War, New York, Prentice-Hall, 1941.

J. Schumpeter, Capitalism, Socialism and Democracy, New York, Harper and Bros., 1947.

Socialist Union*, Twentieth Century Socialism, New York, Penguin Books, 1956.

N. Thomas, Democratic Socialism: A New Appraisal, New York, 1953.

United Nations, Measures for the Economic Development of Underdeveloped Countries, New York, 1951.

Articles

P. Baran, “National Economic Planning,” in: A Survey of Contemporary Economics II.

A. Bergson, “Socialist Economics,” in: A Survey of Contemporary Economics, I.

R. L. Marris, “The position of economics and economists in the government machine, a comparative critique of the United Kingdom and The Netherlands,” Economic Journal 1954.

Source: Harvard University Archives. Syllabi, course outlines and reading lists in Economics, 1895-2003. Box 6, Folder “Economics, 1956-1957 (2 of 2)”.

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HARVARD UNIVERSITY

Final Examination
ECONOMICS 111a
Spring 1957

(Tinbergen & Tsuru)

  1. Comment on the book or articles which you read during the reading period.
  2. Give an answer to three of the following questions in no more than 15 lines for each:
    1. Which industries are publicly owned in most Western European countries?
    2. What does the term “revisionists” mean?
    3. Why do countries in war usually impose regulations on their economies?
    4. Why do agricultural markets tend to be unstable?
    5. What is the essence of social insurance schemes?
    6. What taxes are favored by socialists and why?
  3. Answer one of the following two questions in about two pages:
    1. Give the main arguments in favor of and those against socialization.
    2. What is meant by the economic surplus and what is its characteristic for a socialist economy?
  4. Answer three of the following questions in at most one page each:
    1. What is the difference between a forecast and a plan for the economy as a whole?
    2. Which are the main instruments used by:
      1. A country applying overall year-to-year planning;
      2. A country applying overall development planning; and
      3. A country applying detailed planning?
    3. What are the assumptions underlying input-output analysis and why are they first approximations only?
    4. What were the difficulties facing the Netherlands economy in 1951 and how were they solved?
    5. What is the issue involved in the controversy of “planning versus the law of value”?
    6. What are the salient features of development planning in the present-day India?

Source: Harvard University Archives. Harvard University, Final Examinations, 1853-2001 (HUC 7000.28). Vol. 113: Final Exams—Social Sciences—June 1957. Papers Printed for Final Examinations [in] History, History of Religions, …, Economics, …, Naval Science, Air Science, June 1957.

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HARVARD UNIVERSITY
Department of Economics

Economics 111a
Socialism and Planning
Outline and Extended Bibliography

(Professor Tsuru)

An Appraisal of Marx’s Contribution to Socialism

  1. Vision [1] [2] [3]
  2. Analysis [4]
    1. Historical materialism [5]
      1. Positing of objective laws of the development of society in which an economic process is the prime mover. [3] p. 162, [6] p. 8, [7] Ch. 12
      2. Productive relations and productive forces
    2. The nature of capitalism
      1. Its historical mission and achievements [1]
      2. The labor theory of value [8]
      3. Long-run trends [9] ch. 14, 15, 5, 6, 8, 9
        1. Concentration and monopoly
        2. Increasing misery and unemployment
        3. The falling tendency of the rate of profit
        4. Recurrent crises
      4. Explanatory concepts and ideas
        1. The repudiation of Say’s Law
        2. Reproduction scheme [9] Appendix, [10]
  3. Practical politics
    1. Class struggle [1]
    2. Blueprint—“socialism to communism” [11]
    3. Road to socialism [12] [13]

 

[1] K. Marx and F. Engels, The Communist Manifesto

[2] F. Engels, Socialism, from Utopian to Scientific

[3] J. A. Schumpeter, Capitalism, Socialism and Democracy, 3rd ed., 1950

[4] W. Leontief, “The Significance of Marxian Economics for the Present-Day Economic Theory,” American Economic Review, Supplement, March 1938

[5] M. M. Bober, Karl Marx’s Interpretation of History

[6] P. M. Sweezy, The Present as History, 1953

[7] M. Dobb, On Economic Theory and Socialism, 1955

[8] R. L. Meek, Studies in the Labor Theory of Value, 1956

[9] P. M. Sweezy, The Theory of Capitalist Development, 1942

[10] S. Tsuru, Essays on Marxian Economics, 1956

[11] K. Marx, Critique of the Gotha Programme

[12] K. Marx, Civil War in France

[13] N. Lenin, State and Revolution

*   *   *   *

Economic Characteristics of Socialism

  1. Can we speak of economic characteristics of socialism?
    1. In popular usage of the term [1] [2]
    2. In doctrinal discussion
      1. A few representative definitions
        1. W. G. Sumner [3]
        2. James Bonar [4]
        3. Indian Planning Commission [5]
      2. Earlier orthodox Marxist discussion [6] Ch. 1, [7], [8] Vol. 2, p. 52
        1. Public ownership of the means of production
        2. Centralized planning
        3. Corollaries
          1. conscious spelling out of social goals of production
          2. no class antagonism
      3. Official Soviet discussion
        1. “Basic economic characteristics” of Soviet socialism [9] Ch. 24
        2. Characteristics of people’s democracy [9] Chs. 41, 42
      4. More recent re-appraisal
        1. Background in both capitalist and socialist economies
        2. A standpoint which is increasingly supported by many…that economically socialism and capitalism shade into each other.
  2. Economic characteristics of socialism reconsidered
    1. Pivotal significance of the disposal of the surplus
      1. technical aspect of the surplus
      2. significant questions to be asked
    2. The form of the surplus
    3. The size of the surplus
      1. the incentive aspect
      2. Does the form affect the size? [10] [11]
    4. The manner of disposal of the surplus
      1. the interrelation between the form and the manner of disposal [12]
      2. the interrelation between the size and the manner of disposal
    5. Concluding remarks
      1. John Strachey’s position [13] Ch. 9
      2. What still remains of the economic distinction between socialism and capitalism
      3. Possibility under capitalism of ameliorating undesirable aspects through the action of the state [14] [15] Ch. 13, 19
  3. Secondary distinctions
    1. Insulation of wage-as-cost from wage-as-demand
      1. their unity under capitalism and its consequences
      2. the degree of freedom which exists under socialism and its consequences
      3. modifications which are now feasible under capitalism
    2. Full employment and the problem of cycles
      1. Cycles as characteristics of capitalism [16] Ch. 2
      2. Full employment under socialism
      3. Modifications which are now feasible under capitalism
    3. The role of money and the rate of interest
      1. Early discussions of the subject [8] Vol. 1, Ch. 3; [17]
      2. Different significance of money under capitalism and socialism
      3. The place of interest rate under socialism [18]
    4. The question of incentives
      1. Incentives geared to money return under capitalism vs. incentives geared to targets of limited specifications under socialism
      2. Attempt under socialism to substitute impersonal criteria in the case of firms
      3. Attempt under socialism to introduce more of monetary incentives in the case of individuals [19]
    5. Technological development and the price level
      1. Introduction of technological innovations [20] Ch. 7
      2. Possibility of lowering price level [21]

 

[1] Fortune, Feb. 1957, “The Crisis of Soviet Capitalism”, pp. 102ff.

[2] Sutton and others, The American Business Creed, 1956

[3] C. H. Page, Class and American Sociology: From Ward to Roos, p. 103

[4] Encyclopaedia Britannica, 13th ed. “Socialism”

[5] A. K. Dasgupta, “Socialistic Patterns of Society and the Second Five Year Plan,” The Economic Weekly (Bombay), January 1957, pp. 91-2

[6] P. M. Sweezy, Socialism, 1949

[7] P. M. Sweezy, “Marxian Socialism,” Monthly Review, November 1956

[8] K. Marx, Das Kapital

[9] Political Economy: Textbook (in Russian), Rev. ed., 1955

[10] Joan Robinson, Marx, Marshall & Keynes, (Tokyo) 1956

[11] P. M. Sweezy, The Present as History, Ch. 32, “A crucial difference between capitalism and socialism”

[12] S. Tsuru, “On the Soviet Concept of National Income,” The Annals of Hitotsubashi Academy, October 1954

[13] John Strachey, Contemporary Capitalism, 1956

[14] S. W. Moore, The Critique of Capitalist Democracy, 1957

[15] P. M. Sweezy, The Theory of Capitalist Development, 1942

[16] S. Tsuru, Essays on Marxian Economics, 1956

[17] N. Lenin, Collected Works (Russian ed.), Vol. 29, pp. 329-38

[18] G. Grossman, “Scarce Capital and Soviet Doctrine,” Quarterly Journal of Economics, February 1953

[19] O. Lange, “Sans du nouveau programme économique,” Cahiers Internationaux, Sept.-Oct. 1956, pp. 72-81

[20] John K. Galbraith, American Capitalism, revised ed., 1956

[21] N. M. Kaplan and E. S. Wainstein, “A comparison of Soviet and American Retail Prices in 1950,” Journal of Political Economy, December 1956

Source: Harvard University Archives. Syllabi, course outlines and reading lists in Economics, 1895-2003. Box 6, Folder “Economics, 1956-1957 (2 of 2)”.

Image Source: Jan Tinbergen from Dutch National Archives (February 25, 1966 photograph by Joost Evers).  Tsuru Shigeto from Eumed.net website, webpage: “Economistas”. Shigeto Tsuru (1912-2006).

 

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Economists Harvard

Harvard. Economics PhD alumnus, Mandell Morton Bober, 1925

 

In the previous post we learned that the Harvard David A. Wells Prize winner for 1925-26, Mandell Morton Bober, was Jewish and this fact was considered relevant information in the Harvard economics department’s placement of graduates in university positions. This post provides some more biographical and career detail about Professor Bober who had a long and distinguished career as an economics professor at Lawrence University, Wisconsin.

Fun Facts: Bober taught undergraduate economics to Shinto Tsuru (who was to go on to Harvard graduate economics) and he was for a brief time a colleague of Harry Dexter White. 

Bober’s papers are kept at the Lawrence University archives.

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Bober: Life and career highlights

Born: November 15, 1891 in Kovel, Volhynia then Russia (now Ukraine).
Immigration: September 22, 1911 in New York.
B.S. (Mathematics): 1918 from the University of Montana.
A.M. (Economics): 1920 from Harvard University.
Teaching Assistant: 1923-24 in European Industry and Commerce since 1750 and Economic History of the United States (both taught by Assistant Professor Usher), Harvard University.
Teaching Assistant: 1923-27 in Economics A, Harvard University.
Ph.D.: 1925 in Economics from Harvard University.
Thesis: “Karl Marx’s interpretation of history.” Awarded the David A. Wells Prize for 1925-26. Published in 1927 by Harvard University Press (370 pages). Major revision published in 1948 (445 pages), reviewed by Paul M. Sweezy in Journal of Political Economy (June 1949), pp. 255-56.
Instructor (Economics): 1925, Boston University.
Longest University Appointment: 1927-1961 professorship of economics at Lawrence University in Appleton, Wisconsin.
Visiting professorship: Second semester of 1938-39 at the University of Buffalo for position left by Fritz Machlup (see AER March 1939, Notes, p. 224).
Government work: 1942 at the Office of Price Administration in Washington, D.C.
Textbook: 1955. Intermediate Price and Income Theory. (New York: W. W. Norton).
Honorary LL.D.: 1956 from Grinnell College.
Died: November 1966.

Sources:  From a variety of items found in a search at the geneological site ancestry.com; Annual reports of the President of Harvard College.

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Lawrence College Yearbook (The Ariel) mentions

1943 Yearbook: “M.M. Bober returned this summer to America’s dairyland after a year and a half in Washington, D.C. with the O.P.A…was awarded the David A. Wells prize several years ago for his book on Karl Marx…is chiefly interested in “teaching, teaching and teaching.” p. 15.

1944 Yearbook: M.M. Bober–“in eight years the new deal has graduated from the w.p.a. to the w.p.b.”

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Bober remembered as undergraduate professor of Shigeto Tsuru

When released from prison in the spring of 1931, I found myself expelled from the Higher School; and thus I followed my father’s suggestion to study abroad. My choice was to go to Germany inasmuch as my first foreign language was German. It happened, however, that in 1931 the Marxism-orientated Social Democratic Party was quite strong in Germany, and my father agreed to finance my study abroad only on the condition that I go to the United States. I agreed to this and chose for matriculation a small college in the State of Wisconsin – Lawrence College in Appleton – with a clandestine intention of crossing the Atlantic in due course.

Lawrence College then had another attraction to me, that is the two Harvard-trained economists in residence: Harry Dexter White, who later was instrumental in drafting an alternative plan to that of Keynes in Bretton Woods, and M.M. Bober, a rare specimen of a scholar on Marx in America at the time.

“Shigeto Tsuru” in A Biographical Dictionary of Dissenting Economists (2nded.), Philip Arestis and Malcolm Sawyer (eds.) (Cheltenham, UK: Edward Elgar, 2000). p. 680.

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Bober remembered as reported on the Lawrence Economics Blog
Dec 7, 2012

Professor Galambos points us to The Chaney Tapes — a chronicle of legendary Professor William A. Chaney’s life and times here at Lawrence.  Of particular interest to this blog is the very high profile of Lawrence economists.  Here’s a taste of Professor M.M. Bober:

Some of Professor Chaney’s fondest memories are of his faculty colleagues in the 1950s and 1960s. M. M. Bober, professor of economics, is a particular favorite. His witticisms provide Chaney, himself the master of anecdotal enlightenment, with endless tales.

When discussing an art history professor’s latest attempts at painting, Professor Bober is reported to have said, “Hanging is too good for them”…

Bober’s sharp commentaries even warranted national attention when Time magazine published some of his more notable lines in a review of the retirement of several of academia’s greats in 1957: “If God were half as good to us as we are to Him, we’d be living in paradise,” “Businessmen have as much competition as they cannot get rid of,” and “When you leave this room I want you to feel that you have learned something. Don’t go out and just develop a personality.”

Source:  Economics blog of Lawrence University.

Image Source:  Lawrence College, “Ariel, 1934” (1934), p. 23. Lawrence Yearbooks. 4.

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Chicago Economists Harvard Yale

Harvard. Mason, Domar and Samuelson at Metzler Memorial Service, 1980

 

These memorial remarks for Lloyd Metzler come from Evsey Domar’s papers. Edward S. Mason and Evsey D. Domar’s remarks have been transcribed in full. I have only provided excerpts of those by Paul Samuelson that were published later in Vol. V of his Collected Scientific Papers. The common denominator of all three remembrances is that Metzler was an outlier among economists both with respect to his analytical abilities and contributions to economics as well with respect to his uncommon utter decency. It appears even back then, nice guys in economics attracted as much attention as an albino moose today. Samuelson’s speculative remark regarding Metzler’s assignment to the “Burbank ghetto” is priceless as is his recounting of Keynes’ less than sage advice to Sidney Alexander.

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LLOYD A. METZLER
1913-1980
by Edward S. Mason

We are here to celebrate the life of Lloyd Metzler who gave comfort and pleasure not only to his family but to a host of friends. In the six short years he was at Harvard, he made a name for himself as a scholar of promise and a man to whom others turned for help and companionship.

Lloyd took his first degree at the University of Kansas and studied under a man who was my own teacher and who taught John Lintner and a number of others who later came to Harvard. I’d like to say a word about this man, John Ise, who left his imprint on Lloyd, on me, and on all those who passed through his hands. Ise was one of five children who grew up on the Kansas prairies just after the Sod House days that he later wrote about. All of these children went through the University and all made their mark in life. He was a strong man who fought for his unpopular opinions and encouraged his students to strike out for themselves. I know he impressed Lloyd as much as he did me.

After teaching two years at Kansas, Lloyd came to the Graduate School at Harvard in 1936. It was an interesting period in Cambridge and in the Department of Economics. The old guard was leaving the Department and a new crew coming in. Taussig, Carver, and Bullock retired; Ripley died; and Gay left for the Huntington library. These were the stalwarts who had dominated the Department since 1900. Early in the 1930s, Schumpeter, Leontief, and Haberler joined the Department and, later, Hansen, Schlichter, and Black. They were a vigorous crew. Lloyd early discovered his major interest in international trade and worked, in particular, with Hansen and Haberler. Harvard economics was also fortunate in attracting during that period a number of exceptional graduate students, a number of whom are here with us today. I am sure that Lloyd learned as much from them as from his teachers and, in the process, gave as much as he took.

The 1930s were also a period of upheaval in the country and in the University. In some respects it resembled the late 1960s though the protagonists and antagonists were not as strident or violent. It was a period when new ideas percolated the environment and questions of public policy were much to the fore. The influence of Keynes dominated the last few years of the decade, and Lloyd soon found himself in the middle of Keynesian controversies.

After leaving Harvard in 1942, he spent a year as a Guggenheim Fellow and then joined the Office of Strategic Services for a year. Although OSS had a good stable of economists, I am sure that he felt more at home at the Federal Reserve Board where he served from 1944 to 1946. After that a brief period at Yale, and then the University of Chicago where he was a distinguished member of the Economics Department for the rest of his life.

I leave it to others to comment on his considerable scholarly accomplishments, but want to say something about how Lloyd impressed me as a young man. He was obviously much more than an economist, with deep interests in music and literature. He was a cultivated man who in some respects reminded me of Allyn Young who also had a great interest in music and who, for a brief moment in the 1920s, shed his light on Harvard. Young looked more like a poet than an economist though I admit it is difficult for me to describe just what an economist is supposed to look like. Lloyd was a sensitive gentleman with a gift for friendship. Everyone who knew him like him and all of us join Edith in deeply mourning his departure.

 

ON LLOYD METZLER
by Evsey D. Domar

Last Sunday, The New York Times reviewed another book on President Truman. He is a gold mine for historians. A man of modest ability, yet a good president. Well, perhaps not quite so good… On the other hand, by comparison with our presidents in the recent past and, may I add, expected in the near future, a giant indeed… Many contradictions in his character and performance and so on. Could you find a better man to write about?

Lloyd Metzler does not offer such wonderful opportunities. As I look back over nearly forty years since I first met him, I don’t find contradictions either in his character nor in his actions; what stands out is a man of rare intellectual ability, remarkable modesty and much kindness.

Over my lifetime I have known a number of very bright people, including some economists; and a number of very modest and kind people, also including some economists. But I have never met one who could excel Lloyd in the combination of ability, modesty and kindness.

This was true at Harvard where he was finishing his thesis when I first met him in 194’ [sic]. If a visitor asked then, “Who is your brightest graduate student?” the answer, without any hesitation was “Lloyd Metzler, of course.” If the question was, “Who is your nicest graduate student?” the answer was once again, “Lloyd, of course.” Ant the same was true at the Federal Reserve where he spent a couple of years during the War. It was true in his office, in the cafeteria, in the afternoon math class which he gave for the staff, and outside of that marble building which has lately appeared several times on TV. (Hard to believe now that in those days the interest rate of government securities was something like 2½ per cent.)

As Solzhenitsyn said, he “was the one righteous person without whom, as the saying goes, no city can stand. Neither can the whole world.”

 

LLOYD METZLER
(April 3, 1913—October 26, 1980)
by Paul A. Samuelson

[Excerpts]

That we should hold this memorial service in the Harvard Yard is fitting. Widener Library was Lloyd’s first stamping grounds after he came to Harvard in 1937 from Kansas. Later, when the Littauer building was new, he switched his battleground to the other side of where we now meet. In my mind’s eye, I can still see Lloyd Metzler walking across the Harvard Yard, with his little dachshund in tow, engaged in animated badinage with Bob Bishop or Dan Vandermeulen. A young resident of Winthrop House, destined to be president of the United States [John F. Kennedy], used to be disturbed in his studies by our revels in Lloyd’s Winthrop House tutorial suite.

…To be near K.U., the family finally moved to Lawrence, Kansas. There the spellbinder populist, John Ise, rescued Lloyd from the swamp of the business school. Just as Ise had done with Ed Mason, and as he was to do with John Lintner, Challis Hall, and a host of other sons of the middle border, Ise sent Metzler on to his old graduate student at Harvard.

Harold Hitchings Burbank, noting the Germanic “z” in Lloyd’s name and recognizing his egregious talent, probably mistook him for a Jew…Like other able people Burbank didn’t favor, Lloyd was put in the galleys of Frickey and Crum, to serve as assistant in the undergraduate courses in statistics and accounting. Since I never had that honor, I can with good grace report that the cream of the graduate school, those who have won the Wells Prizes and top honors of our profession, all came from this Burbank ghetto.

…What is in order is to speak of Wassily Leontief and E.B. Wilson We few mathematical economists at Harvard were blessed by these great teachers…Wilson spotted Metzler’s genius. One of President Conant’s few stupid decisions was to retire Wilson at the earliest possible age, and this in a period of teacher shortages, thereby depriving the post-Metzler generations of the consumers’ surplus that Metzler, I, Bergson, Tsuru, Alexander, and some other happy few enjoyed.

That, however , was par for the critics of mathematical economics. In the year that Metzler came to Harvard, Sidney Alexander was Keynes’s last tutee at Cambridge University. Keynes seriously advised Alexander not to waste his time with mathematical economics…

…All in all, Lloyd Metzler added enormously to economic science. And that sense of humor and sweet nature lives on in our happy memories.

Note: Samuelson’s complete remarks at the memorial service were published in The Collected Scientific Papers of Paul A. Samuelson, Vol. V (Kate Crowley, ed.) pp. 827-830. Cambridge, Massachusetts: MIT Press, 1986.

 

Source: Duke University. Rubenstein Library. Papers of Evsey Domar, Box 6, Folder “Correspondence: Lloyd Metzler etc.”

Image Source: “Lloyd A. Metzler/Fellow: Awarded 1942/Field of Study: Economics”John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation. Webpage .