My thanks to Roy Weintraub for identifying himself as the “Kleinsian” expert I sought.  I regret his harsh language, which I don’t think my tepid tone warranted, but let that pass, life is too short for quarreling.  He seems to know a lot about Klein, which is the issue.

I don’t think that having been a CP member once, or naming names for HUAC, or keeping a few personal contacts out of the draft, are inconsistent with being or having been a Keynesian Hawk, so let’s let all that pass, too.

              It is now incumbent on me to locate the original source of my impression from 1990 or so that Klein was a Keynesian Hawk at that time, at least for a while.  If I can’t find it, and/or no one else finds something like it, then either it is lost, or never existed, or I misinterpreted something, and we’ll have to go with those, like Roy, who knew Klein, which I never did.

 

Mason Gaffney

 

 

 

From: Societies for the History of Economics [mailto:[log in to unmask]] On Behalf Of E. Roy Weintraub
Sent: Tuesday, September 19, 2017 11:45 AM
To: [log in to unmask]
Subject: Re: [SHOE] who coined "military Keynesianism"

 

As a Klein student, I insist that MG's claim that Klein had an 80s "epiphany" is nonsense. Klein as we all know was a Communist Party member briefly in 1944-45 when he went to Cowles from MIT. He did not stay at MIT as his mentor Samuelson, who worked at the Rad Labs, wished. Over the years Klein, who renounced his CP membership and named names before the Clardy Committee of HUAC in the early 50s went to Oxford to get away from the McCarthyite predations and the hostility of some Trustees at U Michigan. 

 

My father helped persuade him in England in 1957 to return to the US to take up the offer Chairman Kravis had made to him for a professorship at Penn. (See my discussion of this all in McCarthyism and the Mathematization of Economics, JHET December 2017, preprint available through SSRN).

 

Over the years there he was strongly antiwar, definitely anti-Vietnam, and with Don Katzner organized the alternative AEA job market in Philadelphia as a protest against the AEA's holding their meetings in Mayor Daley's Chicago in 1968 (the Econometric Society pulled out of Chicago and went to Evanston and Northwestern).

 

He did a lot of work to keep his students like me out of the to him immoral Vietnam draft.

 

His work with Arrow in co-founding the organization Economists for Peace and Security was hardly an epiphany, but was fully consistent with his long-held beliefs. The idea that he wished to increase the military's size for macroeconomic benefits is grotesque. With his papers here at Duke, I defy MG to try to provide evidence for such a calumny.

 

On Tue, Sep 19, 2017 at 1:56 PM, Mason Gaffney <[log in to unmask]> wrote:

I haven’t documented this (it’s not worth much time) but I am sure that the early Keynesians (they called it then “The New Economics”) like Seymour Harris, Alvin Hanson, and Paul Samuelson, made it part of their regular schtick that military spending prevented a postwar depression after 1946. It’s been there ever since.

               It may be more relevant today that Lawrence Klein, 1980 Nobelist, in the 1980s or early 1990s, was pushing military spending for its macro benefits.  (I don’t know if he used those exact words, but he used the IDEA.)  Adding confusion, sometime in the 1990s, Klein pops up in a pacifist society – an epiphany?  Some Kleinsian expert out there may know, and let us know.

 

Mason Gaffney

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"There’s no sense in being precise when you don’t even know what you’re talking about."

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(John von Neumann)