“I had, to be sure, been drawn into economics when the General Theory was an exciting revelation for students hungry for explanation and remedy of the Great Depression. At the same time, I was uncomfortable with several aspects of Keynes’ theory, and I sought to improve what would now be called the microfoundations of his macroeconomic relations.”

— James Tobin

"Price Flexibility and Output Stability: An Old Keynesian View" (1993)

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James Tobin 22

American economist 1918–2002

David Colander (1947) American economist

David Colander, "The Keynesian Method, Complexity, and the Training of Economists" (2009)
2000s

“I had become interested in economics, an interest that was transformed into a lifetime dedication when I met with the mathematical theory of general economic equilibrium.”

Gérard Debreu (1921–2004) French economist and mathematician

" Gerard Debreu - Biographical http://www.nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/economic-sciences/laureates/1983/debreu-bio.html". in: Les Prix Nobel. The Nobel Prizes 1983, Editor Wilhelm Odelberg, [Nobel Foundation], Stockholm, 1984; Republished at Nobelprize.org. Nobel Media AB 2014.

“I find it amazing now that my first economics class, taught by Alan Sweezy, used John Maynard Keynes’s General Theory of Income and Employment as the textbook. Although this book is one of the most influential works of the twentieth century, it makes a really lousy textbook. Moreover, since I now regard Keynes’s analysis as seriously flawed, it is surprising that I enjoyed the course so much. As a student, I appreciated the simple way that the Keynesian model explained the workings and failings of the overall economy. Especially appealing were the clever policy remedies, such as increased government spending and tax cuts, that Keynes recommended to combat unemployment. Too bad that I discovered later that the model was theoretically and empirically deficient!”

Robert Barro (1944) American classical macroeconomist

Source: Nothing Is Sacred (2002), p. xiii

“I probably always say the same things; I hope people don't remember. One of the same things I say is that Japanese macroeconomic policy is perversely and inexcusably incompetent, and I surely would say that again. It's true-as Paul Krugman, a fellow participant in this program, has been saying and as I have said here in previous years-that Japan has reinvented the Keynesian liquidity trap. It can now reappear in classrooms where it had been long ignored or at best barely mentioned as a curiosum of the Great Depression.”

James Tobin (1918–2002) American economist

"Reflections on Japanese Political Economy" (1999)

“The early thirties brought what liberal economists called the Great Depression and Marxist economists described as the great crisis of capitalism. It dawned on me that the economic world order was unreliable, unstable, and, most of all, iniquitous. I sought intellectual contacts and friendship with a group of socialist students and also with a small handful of communist-oriented students and unemployed workers.”

Tjalling Koopmans (1910–1985) Dutch American economist

" Tjalling C. Koopmans - Biographical http://www.nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/economic-sciences/laureates/1975/koopmans-bio.html". Nobelprize.org. Nobel Media AB 2013. Web. 9 Jun 2014.

“I shall always regard this aspect of my dispute with Keynes as the greatest mistake of my professional career, and the book, The Great Depression, which I subsequently wrote, partly in justification of this attitude, as something which I would willingly see be forgotten. […] Now I still think that there is much in this theory as an explanation of a possible generation of boom and crisis. But, as an explanation of what was going on in the early ’30s, I now think it was misleading. Whatever the genetic factors of the pre-1929 boom, their sequelae, in the sense of inappropriate investments fostered by wrong expectations, were completely swamped by vast deflationary forces sweeping away all those elements of constancy in the situation which otherwise might have provided a framework for an explanation in my terms. The theory was inadequate to the facts. Nor was this approach any more adequate as a guide to policy. Confronted with the freezing deflation of those days, the idea that the prime essential was the writing down of mistaken investments and the easing of capital markets by fostering the disposition to save and reducing the pressure on consumption was completely inappropriate. To treat what developed subsequently in the way which I then thought valid was as unsuitable as denying blankets and stimulants to a drunk who has fallen into an icy pond, on the ground that his original trouble was overheating.”

Lionel Robbins (1898–1984) British economist

Autobiography of an Economist (1971), p. 154.

“There [is]… a list of five tests which any body of doctrine which aspires to the name of economic theory must be able to meet:
1. Economic theory should unify economic science. - The task of a general body of theory in any subject is to give unity to its investigations…
2. Economic theory should be relevant to the modern problem of control. - Students of economics should spend their efforts upon subjects worth investigation…
3. The proper subject-matter of economic theory is institutions. - The demand that economic theory relate to institutions is implicit in the plea for its relevancy…
4. Economic theory is concerned with matters of process. - If economic theory is to treat of institutions it must know both the kinds of things institutions are and the kinds of things they are not…
5. Economic theory must be based upon an acceptable theory of human behavior.”

Walton Hale Hamilton (1881–1958) Yale Law Professor

After all control and institutions and processes are immediate things. They can all be translated into terms of human conduct...
Source: The Institutional Approach to Economic Theory, 1919, p. 311-6

“I seem to have come to much of the same conclusion as you have reached, though approaching it from the direction of economics and the social sciences rather than from biology - that there is a body of what have been calling "general empirical theory," or "general system theory" in your excellent terminology, which is of wide applicability in many different disciplines. I am sure there are many people all over the world who have come to essentially the same position that we have, but we are widely scattered and do not know each other, so difficult is it to cross the boundaries of the disciplines.”

Kenneth E. Boulding (1910–1993) British-American economist

Kenneth Boulding (1953) in letter to Bertalanffy, cited in: Ludwig von Bertalanffy (1968) General System Theory. p. 14
1950s

“When Keynes’s General Theory was published in February 1936, it obliterated all else on the scene in academic economics. Hayek was known to be working on a treatise on capital as Keynes’s work was published (the work that became The Pure Theory of Capital). While there was some anticipation in academia for this forthcoming major work, interest even by economists in Hayek’s work waned.”

Alan O. Ebenstein (1959) American political scientist, educator and author

Hayek's Journey: The Mind of Friedrich Hayek (2003)

“What we live in, unfortunately, is a time when we are infected by what I call quantum field theory idolatry.”

Robert B. Laughlin (1950) American physicist

39:30 in video
SETI Talk 2013

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