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From:
[log in to unmask] (Barkley Rosser)
Date:
Tue May 1 20:39:19 2007
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    I think I have this about straightened out, except for the original 
question,
who coined "macroeconomics" (or "macro-economics")?  Fonseca's claim
that Frisch did based on his nomenclaturizing tendencies does not suffice 
without
either printed evidence, still not seen, or someone remembering hearing him
using the term verbally, quite possible.  After all, that was Samuelson's 
original
thought, that it was Frisch.
      If nothing else comes up on that one, then Kevin Hoover's posing of
J.M. Fleming (sp?) in 1938 with "macro-economic" seems to be first, ahead of
Lindahl's 1939 doing so, given that his doing so seems to be fresh in that
book and not coming from the 1930 Swedish version of the second chapter
of that book, even though Samuelson said it was Lindahl.
      Regarding "macrodynamic," or "macro-dynamic," I am now inclined to
think that was Frisch and not Kalecki.  Kalecki did use "macrodynamic" in
the title of his 1935 Econometrica paper, which in turn was based on earlier
French and Polish language versions of that paper.  But I have reason to 
believe
that Kalecki picked the term up from Frisch at the Sept. 29, 1933 Leyden
meeting of the Econometric Society.
      Here are two papers presented at that conference.
"Some problems in economic macrodynamics," R. Frisch (no hyphen, in contrast
to his famous essay of that year, quoted here earlier).
"Essai d'une theorie des mouvements cyclique construite a l'aide de la 
mathematique
superieure," M. Kalecki.
      The original Polish version was published in 1933 as
"Proba teorii koniunktury," Warsaw: ISBCP, translated as "Essay in Business 
Cycle
Theory," and appearing in the 1990 vol. 1 of his collected work, edited by 
Ostriansky.
      Several accounts of the 1933 meeting report that Kalecki commented 
critically
on Frish's approach.  Whereas Frisch saw shocks as coming exogenously, with
autocorrelations keeping them going, Kalecki saw them as endogenous, 
although his
early formulations had some mathematical problems.  However, he later used 
lags
and nonlinearities to get the effect he wanted, with there being a deep 
divide between
them that reflects differences between classical and Keynesian views on 
this.
       Some sources on some of this, although there are other papers, are a 
long and
excellent recent one by Daniele Besomi, presented in 2005 at a conference in 
Belgium,
"Formal modeling vs. insight in Kalecki's theory of business cycles."  This 
matter is
also discussed in Malcolm Sawyer, "Kalecki on the trade cycle and growth," 
in
_An Alternative Macroeconomic Theory: The Kaleckian Model and Post-Keynesian
Economics_, ed. by John King, 1996, Kluwer,pp. 93-114.
      Anyway, it looks to me like Kalecki got the term from Frisch, even as 
he used it
in a significantly different way.

Barkley Rosser

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