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Published by EH.Net (February 2003) 
 
Findlay, Ronald Jonung, Lars and Lindahl, Mats eds., _Bertil Ohlin: A 
Centennial Celebration (1899-1999)_. Cambridge, Massachusetts & London, 
England: The MIT Press, 2002. xvi + 546 pp. $60.00 (hardback), ISBN: 
0-262-06228-3. 
 
Reviewed for EH.NET by Michael F. Metcalf, Croft Institute for 
International Studies at The University of Mississippi of Oxford, 
Mississippi. 
 
As Paul Klugman notes about himself (389), Nobel Prize winner in economics 
Bertil Ohlin is probably more known to recent generations of economists by 
way of Paul Samuelson's interpretation than he is from his own published 
works. The centennial celebration of his birth in 1899 that gave rise to 
this book provides ample occasion -- and reason -- to rediscover Ohlin 
through his own work and through his students and former colleagues, as 
well as the opportunity for economists and economic historians to learn 
about his remarkable career as a political party leader and public 
intellectual. 
 
The volume itself is as unusual as it is stimulating. A chapter by his 
three children -- one herself Sweden's minister of finance from 1991 to 
1994 -- reflect on Ohlin the family man in the Sweden of the 1940s, while 
other chapters of a personal nature are contributed by his friend, former 
student, and colleague at the Stockholm School of Economics, Torsten 
Gårdlund, and by Paul Samuelson, who writes about "his" Bertil Ohlin. 
Sections of the book are devoted to the man, the emerging scholar and 
professor, Ohlin's macroeconomics, the Heckscher-Ohlin theory of trade, and 
the role of that theory in economic history. Included is a translation of 
Ohlin's 1922 licentiate thesis "The Theory of Interregional Trade," the 
first to introduce this work to scholars who do not read Swedish. 
 
We learn not only a great deal about Ohlin's early development as a student 
of Eli F. Heckscher and a devotee of Knut Wicksell, but also about the way 
Ohlin transformed the teaching of economics at the University of 
Copenhagen, the post he held before returning to his alma mater, the 
Stockholm School of Economics, to succeed Heckscher as professor of 
economics in 1930. Benny Cartlson and Lars Jonung analyze Ohlin's economics 
journalism in a chapter concentrating on 80 newspaper articles Ohlin 
devoted to issues related to the Great Depression between 1926 and 1935, 
which, we learn, is a but a small sampling of the more than 2,300 newspaper 
articles he published, "half of which appeared in the 1920s and the 1930s, 
before he made the transition from science to politics" (263). Another side 
of Ohlin's multifaceted career is illuminated by Eskil Wadensjö in an 
article on Ohlin's work for the Swedish government's expert committee on 
unemployment between 1927 and 1935, while senior Stockholm journalist 
Svante Nycander elucidates Ohlin's remarkable career as a Liberal Party 
member of Sweden's Riksdag from 1938 until 1970, as a member of the 
four-party national unity government from 1944 to 1945, and, especially, as 
head of the Liberal Party in opposition from 1945 until 1967. 
 
Bertil Ohlin was a remarkable economist, a remarkable public intellectual, 
and a remarkable leader of the Liberals in opposition through most of Tage 
Erlander's years as prime minister during Sweden's booming postwar decades. 
Eclectic in nature, this volume of essays does great justice to most 
aspects of Ohlin's highly productive and principled career in all three 
roles. From Paul  
Samuelson's brief, playful, and appreciative reflection on what he owes to 
Ohlin's thinking (e.g., 51) to Paul Krugman's pondering of the question 
"Was It All in Ohlin?" and on through the fascinating application of the 
Heckscher-Ohlin model to the long centuries between 1400 and 2000 by Kevin 
O'Rourke and Jeffrey Williamson, this is a volume that deserves notice by 
economists, economic historians, and historians of twentieth-century 
Swedish politics, alike. As one whose expertise lies in Sweden's political 
history rather than in either economics or economic history, reading Svante 
Nycander's essay on Ohlin as a politician has given this reviewer an 
enhanced appreciation of his role in shaping the Liberal Party as social 
reform competitors of the Social Democrats during the Second World War and 
as reliable and successful opponents of the Social Democrats' tendencies 
toward establishing state pension plan investment funds that he feared 
would stifle labor market flexibility and thus Sweden's international 
competitiveness. 
 
Overlooking the book's untraditional eclecticism, the only thing that 
warrants serious criticism is the sloppy editing that MIT Press copyeditors 
inflicted on this volume. One of the articles suffers stylistically from 
its Danish author's inadvertent "Danglisms," while some of the Swedish 
authors' "Swenglishisms" likewise go uncorrected. Constructions such as 
"leader writer" (71) for editorial writer, "ideologist" (74) for ideologue, 
and "electors" (90) for voters are undeserved blemishes on what is a 
refreshing set of essays examining Bertil Ohlin's contributions to 
economics, economic history, and Swedish public life and politics. 
 
 
Michael F. Metcalf's publications include _The Riksdag: A History of the 
Swedish Parliament_, St. Martin's Press, 1987. 
 
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