Nicholas Kaldor, 1908–86

Abstract

Modern economics, like modern physics, is a subject in which reputations are made and unmade by essays rather than books. Nicholas Kaldor is a case in point. Unlike the great economists of the nineteenth century, he has never put his ideas together in a single comprehensive treatise and has instead scattered his ideas over some ninety articles, half a dozen of which have become classics of their kind. He has candidly admitted changing his mind more than once on some vital questions and has explained his own failure to write the ‘Great Book’ by the belief that he might yet change it again (Kaldor, 1978b, p. xxix). The willingness to rework his pet theories when they are upset by the discovery of some hitherto unsuspected fact is one of the features that give almost all his writings a fresh and lively quality — that and his constant insistence that fruitful economic analysis must be grounded in empirically derived ‘laws’ or statistical regularities. His own description of his work in the last twenty years perfectly captures this pragmatic element in his approach to economic questions:

I tried to find what kind of regularities can be detected in empirically observed phenomena and then tried to discover what particular testable hypotheses would be capable of explaining the association … It is an approach which is more modest in scope (in not searching for explanations that derive from a comprehensive model of the system) and also more ambitious in that it directly aims at discovering solutions (or remedies) for real problems. (Kaldor, 1978b, p. xviii; also Kaldor, 1985, p. 8)