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Michal Kalecki
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Michal Kalecki (June 22, 1899 in Lódz – April 18, 1970 in Warsaw) was a Polish economist who specialized in macroeconomics. Over the course of his life, he worked at the London School of Economics, University of Cambridge, University of Oxford and Warsaw School of Economics as well as an economic advisor to governments of Cuba, Israel, Mexico and India.
Kalecki has been called “one of the most distinguished economists of the 20th century” and has sometimes been regarded as a "left-wing" John Maynard Keynes.
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Michal Kalecki (June 22, 1899 in Lódz – April 18, 1970 in Warsaw) was a Polish economist who specialized in macroeconomics. Over the course of his life, he worked at the London School of Economics, University of Cambridge, University of Oxford and Warsaw School of Economics as well as an economic advisor to governments of Cuba, Israel, Mexico and India.
Kalecki has been called “one of the most distinguished economists of the 20th century” and has sometimes been regarded as a "left-wing" John Maynard Keynes. It is often claimed that he developed many of the same ideas as Keynes, before Keynes; however, since he published in Polish, he remains much less known to the English-speaking world.
Biography
Kalecki was born in Lódz, Poland, in 1899 to a middle class family. His father owned a small scale weaving factory while his mother came from a family of public servants. He went to high school in Lódz and afterward began studies at the Warsaw Polytechnic Institute. Between 1919 and 1921 he was a member of the Polish Armed Forces and consequently resumed his studies at the Gdansk Polytechnic. He did not, however, finish his degree. Between 1929 and 1936 he worked for the Institute of Studies of Economic Conditions and Prices (Instytut Badan Koniunktur Gospodarczych i Cen) in Warsaw, during which time he wrote some of his most famous works. Unfortunately, as he published these in Polish or French rather than English, his contributions remained unrecognized until much later.
In 1936 he moved to England where he first worked at the LSE and later at Cambridge. During the war he was a member of the Statistical Institute at Oxford University and worked on a economic plan of rationing under wartime conditions on which he collaborated directly with Keynes.
He moved back to Poland in 1946 where he was an advisor to the Polish Central Planning Bureau and held a post in the Ministry of Finance.
Work
Kalecki's works from 1933–35 introduced many concepts that were later stated in John Maynard Keynes's General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money, published in February, 1936. However, as Kalecki's works were published in Polish (and a few in French), they went unknown and unrecognized by the wider world. Kalecki's claim of precedence to Keynes, in a 1936 article, likewise went into oblivion as the article was not translated into English.
Only his later works were published in English, but the delay in their translation cost him much fame. Eventually his theories on business cycles (1935, 1937, 1939, 1943, 1954) did gain him some recognition for their advancement of the use of mathematical dynamics in economics. In his works he used both Classical and Marxist concepts, relying extensively on the theories of class conflict, income distribution and imperfect competition. Those very concepts would later gain much popularity with the Cambridge Keynesians school, especially with economists such as Joan Violet Robinson, Nicholas Kaldor and Richard M. Goodwin, and would be used within the modern Post-Keynesian economics school.
In his study of Marxian-type unemployment and business cycle, Kalecki blamed the government for deliberately permitting unemployment in order to keep wages low.
In cost-of-production theory of value, he distinguished between sectors with "cost-determined prices" (such as manufacturing and services) and those with "demand-determined prices" (such as agriculture and raw-materials extraction).
Kalecki studied both the semi-capitalist economy in prewar Poland and the communist economy in the postwar Polish People's Republic.
In the first half of the 1990s, Oxford University Press published 7 volumes of the Collected Works of Michal Kalecki, referring to him as "one of the most distinguished economists of the 20th century." Many of his works were translated into English for the first time in this collection.
Publications
- "Mr Keynes's Predictions," Przeglad Socjalistyczny, 1932.
- Essay on the Theory of the Business Cycle, 1933.
- "Essai d'une theorie du mouvement cyclique des affaires," Revue d'economie politique, 1935.
- "A Macrodynamic Theory of Business Cycles", 1935, Econometrica.
- "The Mechanism of Business Upswing", 1935, Polska Gospodarcza.
- "Some Remarks on Keynes's Theory", 1936, Ekonomista.
- "A Theory of the Business Cycle", 1937, RES.
- "A Theory of Commodity, Income and Capital Taxation", 1937, EJ.
- "The Principle of Increasing Risk", 1937, Economica.
- "The Determinants of Distribution of the National Income", 1938, Econometrica.
- Essays in the Theory of Economic Fluctuations, 1939.
- "A Theory of Profits", 1942, EJ.
- Studies in Economic Dynamics, 1943.
- "Political Aspects of Full Employment", 1943, Political Quarterly.
- "Professor Pigou on the Classical Stationary State", 1944, EJ.
- "Three Ways to Full Employment", 1944 in Economics of Full Employment.
- "A Note on Long Run Unemployment", 1950, RES.
- Theory of Economic Dynamics: An essay on cyclical and long- run changes in capitalist economy, 1954.
- "Observations on the Theory of Growth", 1962, EJ.
- Studies in the Theory of Business Cycles, 1933-1939, 1966.
- "The Problem of Effective Demand with Tugan-Baranovski and Rosa Luxemburg", 1967, Ekonomista.
- "The Marxian Equations of Reproduction and Modern Economics", 1968, Social Science Information.
- "Trend and the Business Cycle", 1968, EJ.
- "Class Struggle and the Distribution of National Income", 1971, Kyklos.
- Selected Essays on the Dynamics of the Capitalist Economy, 1933-1970, 1971.
- Selected Essays on the Economic Growth of the Socialist and the Mixed Economy, 1972.
- The Last Phase in the Transformation of Capitalism, 1972.
- Essays on Developing Economies, 1976.
- Collected Works of Michal Kalecki (1-6), Oxford University Press, 1990s, ISBN 1) 0198285388, 2) 0198286643, 3) 0198286651, 4) 019828666X, 5) 0198286678, 6) 0198286686
See also
Further reading
External links
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