Nicholas Kaldor (1908-1986)

John E. King

Introduction

Nicholas Kaldor was part of an astonishingly talented generation of Hungarian economists born in the early years of the twentieth century that included Thomas Balogh, William Fellner, George Katona, John von Neumann, and Tibor Scitovsky. The son of a prosperous Jewish lawyer, Kaldor was born in Budapest on 12 May 1908. He was educated at the University of Berlin and the London School of Economics (LSE), where he spent 20 years (1927-1947) as undergraduate, research student, and Lecturer. After two years at the United Nations Economic Commission for Europe (UNECE) in Geneva he returned to academic life in October 1949 as Fellow of King’s College, Cambridge. Kaldor was appointed to a personal Chair in 1966. He retired in 1975 but remained very active in research and policy advocacy right up to his death in Cambridge on 30 September 1986. The core of Kaldor’s voluminous writings can be found in the nine volumes of his selected economic essays (Kaldor 1960-1989), supplemented by the posthumously published 1984 Raffaele Mattioli Lectures (Kaldor 1996); an excellent sample of his work is provided by Targetti and Thirlwall (1989). There are three intellectual biographies (Thirlwall 1987; Targetti 1992; King 2009), and details of the Cambridge context of his work are provided by Harcourt (2006), King (2002), and Pasinetti (2007).

J.E. King (h)

Emeritus Professor, La Trobe University and Honorary Professor, Federation University, Australia e-mail: This email address is being protected from spam bots, you need Javascript enabled to view it

R.A. Cord (ed.), The Palgrave Companion to Cambridge Economics,

DOI 10.1057/978-1-137-41233-1_33

In terms of institutional affiliation, Kaldor was a Cambridge economist only for the last 37 years of his life. Intellectually, though, his affiliation with Cambridge can be traced back to the late 1930s, when he came under the influence of The General Theory and began to discuss the new macroeconomics with Keynes’s younger disciples. Geographically, Kaldor became a Cambridge economist in September 1939, on the outbreak of the Second World War, when the Aldwych premises of the LSE were taken over by the Ministry of Works and its entire staff and student body moved to Cambridge. But the focus of this chapter will be on the period after his arrival at King’s in 1949.

The chapter begins with a brief discussion of Kaldor’s work before 1949 (in Section 2). This is followed by the three principal sections, dealing with his theories of growth and distribution (Section 3); his writings on economic policy, first for developing countries and then for Britain, including his attack on monetarism (Section 4); and his broad-based post-1970 critique of mainstream economic theory (Section 5). In the brief conclusion (Section 6), I assess Kaldor’s contribution as a Cambridge Post Keynesian economist.