Nicholas Kaldor 1908–86

Professor Lord Kaldor, who died at Papworth hospital near Cambridge on 30 September 1986, aged 78, was one of the most distinguished economists of the 20th century who will be recorded in the history of economic thought as a brilliant theoretician and applied economist, surpassed in originality only by Keynes and Harrod among British economists this century. He was a dominant influence in economic debates on the world stage for over fifty years, and hardly a branch of economics escaped his pen. At the London School of Economics (LSE) in the 1930s, while still in his twenties, he emerged as one of the country’s leading economic theoreticians making fundamental contributions to controversies in the theory of the firm and in capital theory; to trade cycle theory and welfare economics, and to Keynesian economics by ‘generalizing’ Keynes’s General Theory, which nearly 50 years later led Sir John Hicks to remark, ‘I think that your (1939) paper was the culmination of the Keynesian revolution in theory. You ought to have had more honour for it.’1 His reputation was such that in 1938, and still only thirty, he was offered a Chair by the prestigious University of Lausanne — the home of Walras and Pareto — which he reluctantly declined. Keynes thought extremely highly of him. In a letter to Jesus College, Cambridge in 1943 suggesting Kaldor as an Economics Fellow, Keynes wrote, ‘I put him very high among the younger economists in the country … He is of the calibre which would justify the immediate election to a Readership … He is a brilliant talker and one of the most attractive people about the place.’2