Charles P. Kindleberger (
1910 to
July 7,
2003) was a historical economist and
author of over 30 books. His
1978 book
Manias, Panics, and Crashes, about speculative
stock market bubbles, was reprinted in
2000 after the
dot-com bubble.
Life
His earliest book was International Short-Term Capital Movements (1937).
As a 'historical' economist (or economic historian), Kindleberger relied on narrative exposition and knowledge of history rather than mathematical models to prove his point.
Kindleberger described his around-the-clock work to develop and launch the Marshall Plan with singular passion in a 1973 interview.
'We were conscious of a great sense of excitement about the plan. Marshall himself was a great, great man -- funny, odd but great -- Olympian in his moral quality. We'd stay up all night, night after night. The first work ever done that I know about in economics on computers used the Pentagon's computers at night for the Marshall Plan. I had a tremendous sense of gratification from working so hard on it,' Kindleberger said.
Kindleberger was on familiar terms with noted economists and was a graduate of the University of Pennsylvania and Columbia University (A.M., Ph.D.), later rising to the eminent position of Ford International Professor of Economics at MIT.
The World in Depression
His 1973 and 1986 book The World in Depression 1929-1939 (University of California Press, 1986 [Revised and Enlarged Edition]) advances an idiosyncratic, internationalist view of the causes and nature of the Great Depression. Blaming the peculiar length and depth of the Depression on the hesitancy of the US in taking control of the world economy when Britain was no longer up to the role after WWI, he concludes that 'for the world economy to be stabilized, there has to be a stabilizer--one stabilizer', by which, in the context of the interwar years at least, he means the United States. In the last chapter 'An Explanation of the 1929 Depression' Kindleberger lists the five responsibilities the US would have had to assume in order to stabilize the world economy:
- maintaining a relatively open market for distress goods ;
- providing countercyclical , or at least stable, long-term lending;
- policing a relatively stable system of exchange rates;
- ensuring the coordination of macroeconomic policies;
- acting as a lender of last resort by discounting or otherwise providing liquidity in a financial crisis.
Kindleberger is highly sceptical of Friedman and Schwartz's monetarist view of the causes of the Depression, seeing it as too narrow and perhaps dogmatic, and dismisses what he characterises as Samuelson's 'accidental' or 'fortuitous' interpretation out of hand. The World in Depression was praised by John Kenneth Galbraith as 'the best book on the subject'.
Further Information
MIT's obituary
