person
James Tobin
American economist (1918–2002). Principal twentieth-century articulator of the Old Keynesian neoclassical synthesis; portfolio-balance theory of monetary transmission; Tobin's Q. Nobel laureate 1981.
Stub.
James Tobin’s career at Yale produced the principal twentieth-century elaboration of the Old Keynesian neoclassical synthesis as a research program rather than a textbook position. Portfolio-balance theory of monetary transmission, Tobin’s Q, the original “Tobin tax” proposal (1972) on currency transactions. His 1972 AEA presidential address (“Inflation and Unemployment”) is the most articulate Old Keynesian defence of the Phillips Curve against the Friedman-Phelps natural-rate critique. Nobel Memorial Prize 1981. A consistent intellectual antagonist of Friedman — the two debated repeatedly through the 1960s and 1970s — without ever being a fellow-traveller of the heterodox Keynesian schools.