Humane Economist

V Pandit’s warm tribute to the life and academic times of Lawrence Klein (EPW, 1 February 2014) is a wholly justified celebration of a distinguished economist’s lifelong contribution and dedication to concerned policy analysis, based on solid theory but underpinned by humane concerns.

I would like to add three very minor notes to Pandit’s excellent summary. While it is true that Klein had to “face the McCarthyist wrath” when the so-called House Un-American Activities Committee discovered his brief membership of the American Communist Party in the 1940s, the proximate cause of his move to the Institute of Statistics at Oxford may have had much to do with the fact that the University of Michigan denied him tenure, in 1954 (surely due to “McCarthyist” pressures). The other notable examples who faced such wrath were Lorie Tarshis and Richard Goodwin and even Paul Samuelson. Samuelson is on record (the most pungent “confession” is recorded in Robert Clower’s unpublished Perugia Lectures on Monetary Theory) as having “confessed” that he had to coin the phrase “neoclassical synthesis to keep McCarthy off (his) back”.