We've visited with Wynne Godley a few times, most recently in "Professor Wynne Godley: The Man Who Foresaw the Euromess Twenty Years Ago".
As I said in the intro to 2010's "London Times Obituary: 'Professor Wynne Godley: economist"'
One of the heavyweights.Or, as the Times put it in their first sentence:
As Professor of Applied Economics at Cambridge, a civil servant in the Treasury and later as one of the Treasury’s panel of “six wise men”, Wynne Godley was the most insightful macroeconomic forecaster of his generation. He made major, though as yet not fully recognised, contributions to macroeconomic theory....One more bit of self-referential (reverential?) linkage. In last year's post on what I called Izabella Kaminska's "The Theory of Everything" I mentioned en passant the guy who convinced Godley to hang his hat at Cambridge:
...In our next installment we'll look at “Kaldor’s stylized facts”(Cambridge economist Nicholas, Baron Kaldor ) to judge whether the facts were just opinions or still hold true, how they influence the #Occupy folks and why I couldn't take #Occupy as seriously as many did and ended up with posts such as "Octopi Wall Street" and "Ossify Wall Street: Russell Simmons/Kanye West; Richard Trumka, Tim Robbins Swing By" along with the trilogy...Kaldor's Stylized Facts are at the heart of the question of whether the current economy can provide employment for millions of people who are on the verge of being made irrelevant in economic terms.
What was old is new again.*
From Mike Norman Economics:
Inspiration
This blog is intended to allow me to record and share occasional ideas, principally in the realm of monetary economics.
My main inspiration comes from the work of Wynne Godley, my supervisor at Cambridge in the 1980s. I was privileged to spend many hours with him working on the development of prototype data-driven stock-flow models of the UK economy. My own input was perhaps limited to inputting data, but in return I learned enormous amounts about theoretical and empirical modelling. I had been interested in the long-run dynamics of models before, but Wynne's ideas were a revelation to me and have shaped the way I have thought about macroeconomic issues ever since.
For most of the time since then, I have worked in commercial fields, paying little attention to academic economics. This has given me a much deeper understanding of the way things really work, but has meant that I have not been exposed to more recent developments in economic thinking. Coming back to the subject now, I'm not sure that I've missed anything important.
Nick EdmondsReflections on Monetary Economics
(h/t Ramanan at The Case for Concerted Action)
*Importantly for folks who muck about with commodities, Kaldor also coined the term convenience yield and developed Working's thoughts into The Theory of Storage.
See also:
The Genius of Wynne Godley: "Maastricht and All That"
