Nicholas Kaldor: A Biography, 1908–1986

Abstract

Professor Lord Kaldor, who was elected a Fellow of the Academy in 1963, and who gave the Academy’s Keynes Lecture in 1982,¹ died at Papworth Hospital near Cambridge on 30 September 1986, aged 78. He was one of the most distinguished economists of the twentieth century who will be recorded in the history of economic thought as a brilliant theoretician and applied economist, surpassed in originality only by Keynes and Harrod among British economists this century. He was a dominant influence in economic debates on the world stage for over fifty years, and hardly a branch of economics escaped his pen. At the London School of Economics (LSE) in the 1930s, while still in his twenties, he emerged as one of the country’s leading economic theoreticians making fundamental contributions to controversies in the theory of the firm and in capital theory; to trade cycle theory and welfare economics, and to Keynesian economics by ‘generalizing’ Keynes’s General Theory, which nearly fifty years later led Sir John Hicks to remark: ‘I think that your (1939) paper was the culmination of the Keynesian revolution in theory. You ought to have had more honour for it.’² His reputation was such that in 1938, and still only thirty, he was offered a Chair by the prestigious University of Laussane—the home of Walras and Pareto—which he reluctantly declined.

First published in Proceedings of the British Academy, Vol. LXXIII (1987).