James Tobin

At the same time it offered the hope, as it still does, that improved understanding could better the lot of mankind. For me, growing up in the 1930s, the two motivations powerfully reinforced each other.

After the United States entered the war, I joined the Naval Reserve and spent ninety days in a Columbia University dormitory learning to be a naval officer.

I studied economics and made it my career for two reasons. The subject was and is intellectually fascinating and challenging, particularly to someone with taste and talent for theoretical reasoning and quantitative analysis.

The miserable failures of capitalist economies in the Great Depression were root causes of worldwide social and political disasters.

Yale places great stress on undergraduate and graduate teaching. I like teaching, and I do a lot of it.

The crisis triggered a fertile period of scientific ferment and revolution in economic theory.

At the time, my personal research objectives were to provide Keynesian economics with more rigorous foundations and to tighten and elaborate the logic of macroeconomic and monetary theory.