The Vital Contributions of John Cornwall to Economic Theory and Policy: A Tribute from Two Admiring Friends on the Occasion of His 70th Birthday

Abstract

G.H. first met John Cornwall in 1963 and M.M. was his doctoral student at Southern Illinois University from 1970 to 1972. John and G.H. were both on leave from their respective universities (Tufts and Adelaide) in Cambridge during the latter’s most exciting decade of the postwar years. Ken Arrow and Bob Solow were both spending a year there, Solow to give the Alfred Marshall Lectures on two mythical creatures, ‘Joan’ and ‘Nicky’ (with only one of the real creatures, Joan, able to attend, as Nicky was in Australia). Frank Hahn and Robin Matthews were writing Hahn and Matthews (1964) and Piero Sraffa’s (1960) book had only recently been published. The ‘Secret Seminar’ was in full flight and the members of the Faculty of Economics and Politics (which included the Department of Applied Economics) read almost like a Who’s Who in modern economics, young and old. John and G.H. saw a great deal of each other; G.H. found John to be the nearest to an Australian an American was ever likely to be! They had endless discussions on economics and other matters. John wrote a comment (entitled ‘Wham’) on the first draft of Hahn and Matthews’s survey of growth theory, and advised G.H. on the two-sector model which he was then developing (Harcourt, 1965), introducing him to the term ‘recursive’ to describe the method used in it.