There’s a new short biography of Nicholas Kaldor titled Nicholas Kaldor’s Economics: A Review by Luis Gomes. The author reminds of Kaldor’s proposals for the world as a whole, something which is highly needed today more than ever (and something I regularly refer to):

In 1984 Nicholas Kaldor gave a series of lectures in Italy, which become a posthumous book in 1996. These lectures [“Causes of Growth and Stagnation in the World Economy” … ] presented an integrated set of policies with which to tackle economic problems. In this series of lectures, Nicholas Kaldor commented on the four basic principles for good macroeconomic administration: (i) it is needed a coordinated fiscal action which include a set of targets for a balanced balance of payments and a full employment budget; (ii) the interest rate should be the lowest possible: (iii) it is important to prevent the volatility of international commodity prices (via stocks and via an international currency) (iv) it is necessary to overcome chronic inflation trends under full employment, due to the system of adjusting wages via sectoral collective agreement …

There are many biographies (from short articles to full papers) and I thought I should list them:

A short article titled Portrait: Nicholas Kaldor by Luigi Pasinetti, published in 1981 published in Challenge.
Luigi Pasinetti’s Nicholas Kaldor: A Few Personal Notes, published in 1983.
Anthony Thirlwall’s 1987 book titled Nicholas Kaldor,
Anthony Thirlwall’s 1987 article Nicholas Kaldor 1908–1986. Republished 1991 in the book Nicholas Kaldor And Mainstream Economics Confrontation Or Convergence? and again in 2015 in the book Essays On Keynesian And Kaldorian Economics.
Geoffrey Harcourt’s article Nicholas Kaldor, 12 May 1908–30 September 1986 published in 1988 in Economica and republished in the book Post-Keynesian Essays In Biography by Harcourt himself.
Ferdinando Targetti’s 1992 book Nicholas Kaldor: The Economics And Politics Of Capitalism As A Dynamic System.
Marjorie Shepherd Turner’s book Nicholas Kaldor And The Real World published in 1993.
Anthony Thirwall’s section Nicholas Kaldor, A Biography in Nicholas Kaldor’s book Causes Of Growth And Stagnation In The World Economy published posthumously in 1996.
Adrian Wood‘s entry Kaldor, Nicholas (1908–1986) in The New Palgrave Dictionary Of Economics published in 2008.
John E. King’s book Nicholas Kaldor published in 2008.
Luigi Pasinetti’s chapter Nicholas Kaldor (1908–1986): Growth, Income Distribution, Technical Progress in his book Keynes And The Cambridge Keynesians: A ‘Revolution in Economics’ To Be Accomplished, published in 2009.
John E. King’s chapter Nicholas Kaldor (1908–1986) in the book Handbook On The History Of Economic Analysis Volume I published in 2016.
John E. King’s chapter Nicholas Kaldor (1908–1986) in The Palgrave Companion To Cambridge Economics published in 2017. (h/t Marc Lavoie).

Apart from the above, following are useful to know about Nicholas Kaldor, although can’t be described as biography:

Introduction by Ferdinand Targetti and Anthony Thirlwall to the book The Essential Kaldor, a collection of papers of Kaldor, published in 1989.

Have I missed any?

The world is more Kaldorian than Keynesian. After the crisis, Keynes became popular again but his Cambridge descendent Nicholas Kaldor is hardly remembered by the economics community. Even his biographers have some memory loss of him.

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Anthony Thirlwall and John E. King are biographers of Nicholas Kaldor. Superb books.

There’s a chapter Talking About Kaldor: An Interview With John King in Anthony Thirlwall’s book Essays on Keynesian and Kaldorian Economics. There’s an interesting discussion on money endogeneity (Google Books link):

J.E.K. … I wonder if Kaldor would have gone as far as Moore in arguing that the money supply curve is horizontal.

Anthony Thirlwall replies saying he would have argued that the supply of money is elastic with respect to demand, instead of quoting him. Here’s Nicholas Kaldor stating explicitly in a footnote in Keynesian Economics After Fifty Years, in the book, Keynes And The Modern World, ed. George David Norman Worswick and James Anthony Trevithick, Cambridge University Press, 1983, on page 36:

Diagrammatically, the difference in the presentation of the supply and demand for money, is that in the original version, (with M exogenous) the supply of money is represented by a vertical line, in the new version by a horizontal line, or a set of horizontal lines, representing different stances of monetary policy.
[italics: mine]

Anthony Thirlwall is one of the commenter in the book chapter. The book is proceedings of a conference on Keynes.

But that’s not enough. Turn to page 363 of the book.

A.P.T. He had a very high regard for Sraffa but he never wrote on this topic.
J.E.K. Not something that would really have concerned him very much? Too abstract and too removed from reality?
A.P.T. Probably, yes. It is quite interesting that Sraffa was his closest friend, both personal and intellectual, and they used to meet very regularly – almost every day when Sraffa was alive. But there’s no evidence that they ever discussed Production of Commodities by Means of Commodities.
J.E.K. That’s amazing. There’s certainly no evidence that he ever wrote anything on those questions.
A.P.T. There’s no evidence that he wrote anything, or that indeed he really understood Sraffa. Well, he had the broad thrust, but I don’t know that he ever read it carefully, or understood the implications.

In Volume 9, of Kaldor’s Collected Works, there are two memoirs. One of Piero Sraffa and the other on John von Neumann.

Nicholas Kaldor on Piero Sraffa

Interestingly the editors and F. Targetti (another biographer) and A.P. Thirlwall!

I guess if you know a person so closely – like the biographers do, of Kaldor- you tend to forget a few things about them.

The Case For Concerted Action

Post-Keynesian Ideas For A Crisis That Conventional Remedies Cannot Resolve

Tag Archives: ferdinando targetti

Biographies Of Nicholas Kaldor

Kaldor’s Footnote And Kaldor On Sraffa

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