Bio

Who is James Tobin?

James Tobin was born in Champaign, Illinois, in 1918. His father was a publicity director at the University of Illinois and his mother was a social worker. She told him tales of the suffering caused by unemployment and he noted later that the Depression had marked him profoundly. It was clear that a lot of things that were wrong with the world had a lot to do with economics," he recalled.

Tobin was an undergraduate at Harvard in the 1930s, when the university's economics department included Joseph Schumpeter and Alvin Hansen. During this time he was introduced to the ideas of John Maynard Keynes, who had only just published The General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money (1936), advocating government intervention in the economy. Tobin's undergraduate thesis, which explored similar issues, was broadly supportive of Keynes, though it was critical of some of his methods, and he remained wedded to Keynes's theory throughout his career.

Tobin graduated in 1939 and took a masters in economics the following year. In 1941 he joined the Office of Price Administration as an economist, and after the attack on Pearl Harbor he enlisted in the Navy. He joined the training program at Columbia University for "90 day wonders" -- those who were taught to be naval officers in only three months.

Arranged alphabetically in their dormitory, Tobin met Herman Wouk, whose novel The Caine Mutiny won the Pulitzer Prize in 1952. The first chapter of the book mentioned a barely-concealed "mandarin-like midshipman named Tobit with … a mind like a sponge".

Tobin finished his naval duty, after four years on the destroyer Kearny in the Atlantic and the Mediterranean, as the ship's executive officer. Having returned to Harvard, he completed his doctorate in 1947 before spending three years as a junior fellow in the Society of Fellows and moving to Yale in 1950. In the early 1950s he edited two economics journals, Econometrica and the Review of Economic Studies, and he became a professor at Yale in 1955. From 1957 until 1988 he served as Sterling Professor of Economics. (During the 1970s he created a short-lived student loan program at Yale with Milton Friedman.)

In 1961 Tobin was asked by President Kennedy to join the Council of Economic Advisers. He enjoyed the fact that after Kennedy said that he was an "ivory tower President", he stuck to his word, taking advice from a team that included future Nobel prizewinners Kenneth Arrow and Robert Solow. But after one and a half years Tobin returned to academic life at Yale, explaining that the volume of work was proving hard on his wife and four children.

Tobin held visiting professorships in Berkeley and Nairobi and honorary degrees from universities all around the world. He served as president of the Econometric Society and the American Economic Association.

Tobin in 1981, the year he won a Nobel Prize and criticised the policies of President Reagan

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