James Tobin
James Tobin
James Tobinwas an American economist who served on the Council of Economic Advisers 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...
NationalityAmerican
ProfessionEconomist
Date of Birth5 March 1918
CountryUnited States of America
At the time, my personal research objectives were to provide Keynesian economics with more rigorous foundations and to tighten and elaborate the logic of macroeconomic and monetary theory.
The stories of the Brooklyn Bridge and the Golden Gate already had been well-told by others, both on film and in books, ... But here was this remarkable, all-but-unknown story about Gustav Lindenthal and Othmar Ammann ... and how they fought each other to realize the dream of bridging the Hudson with what would be the longest bridge in the world.
I was born in Champaign in 1918. From the neighborhood elementary and intermediate schools, I went to the University High School in the twin city, Urbana.
Most important, I have learned from my colleagues and students.
I studied economics and made it my career for two reasons. The subject was and is intellectually fascinating and challenging, particularly to someone with taste and talent for theoretical reasoning and quantitative analysis.
From 1966 to 1970 I served as Chairman of the New Haven City Plan Commission.
My father also happened to be an intellectual, as learned, literate, informed, and curious as anyone I have known. Unobtrusively and casually, he was my wise and gentle teacher.
I happily took for granted that I would attend the very good local university and probably go on to its law school. Harvard was my father's idea.
The crisis triggered a fertile period of scientific ferment and revolution in economic theory.
Yale places great stress on undergraduate and graduate teaching. I like teaching, and I do a lot of it.
The miserable failures of capitalist economies in the Great Depression were root causes of worldwide social and political disasters.
There was considerable danger they'd be forgotten and their contributions buried,
I think the filmmakers and I were interested in telling stories that weren't well known,
I just find Ammann so appealing ... so deliberate, so smart, a walk-the-walk kind of guy who did something he cared about so deeply, ... I kind of fell in love with that bridge, too -- in fact, with the whole suspension bridge form. It's just a beautiful, beautiful structure.