Michal Kalecki, 1898–1970: a New Macro-economics

Abstract

Kalecki was born in Poland in June 1899 and died there in April 1970. He initially studied civil engineering, but had to give up his studies for financial reasons in 1923. In 1929 he became a member of the Institute of Research in Business Cycles and Prices in Warsaw, resigning in 1936 because of the dismissal of two colleagues for political reasons. He then went abroad, first to Sweden and then to England. There he established scholarly connections with Kahn, Sraffa and Joan Robinson. In 1940 he joined the Oxford Institute of Statistics and from 1945 worked for international organisations (the International Labor Office and the United Nations, for the last of which he prepared World Economic Reports). When McCarthyism reached great height in the United States, he returned to Poland (1955), working for the Planning Commission (1955–65) and teaching at the Polish Academy of Sciences (1955–61). From 1961 to 1970 he worked for the Central School of Planning and Statistics. His academic work spawned many publications. In 1939, he published Essays in the Theory of Economic Fluctuations, followed by Studies in Dynamic Economics (1943) and Theory of Economic Dynamics (1954). Most of his work tended to be published in journal articles.