Tobin on macroeconomic policy: A review essay

Professor Tobin's scientific contributions to macroeconomics, monetary theory, portfolio theory, the theory of economic growth, and other topics place him among the leaders of our profession. So many of his contributions are well known, and highly regarded, that it seems superfluous to praise them further. Like many others who were attracted to economics from the 1920s through the 1950s, Tobin sees economics as more than a set of abstractions, more than a collection of theorems and empirical regularities, and more than a branch of applied mathematics. Whatever its other pretensions, for Tobin as for me, economics is a policy science. We study economics, not least, to order the facts about the world and to learn how welfare can be increased. To encourage policy changes, Tobin lectures on economic policy not only to his students, but to the Congress, the administration, and the general public. He writes in scholarly journals but also in journals of opinion, in the public press, in Congressional hearings and wherever social and economic issues are discussed.