Wynne Godley
Wynne Alexander Hugh Godley (born September 2, 1926 in London - † May 13, 2010 ) was a British oboist , economist and university professor .
biography
Origin and Studies
Wynne Godley was the son of attorney Hugh Godley, later 2nd Baron Kilbracken, and adviser to the Supreme Chairman of the Committees of the House of Lords . His grandfather Arthur Godley was Permanent Undersecretary of State of the Ministry for India ( India Office ) from 1883 to 1909 and then became 1st Baron Kilbracken. His mother, Elizabeth Godley, was a poet , playwright , pianist , composer, and actress .
In 1933 he became a ward of the royal court with his older siblings and began his school career at the private school Ashdown House. After the divorce of his parents and the remarriage of his father, he completed his further education at the rugby school since 1937 . He then began studying Philosophy, Politics and Economics (PPE) at the New College of the University of Oxford and graduated from this interdisciplinary course, influenced by Isaiah Berlin and the economist PWS Andrews, in 1947 as the best of his year.
He then completed a degree at the Conservatoire de Paris and graduated in 1950 as an oboist , in which year his stepmother committed suicide and his father also died. After returning to England in 1951, he became principal oboist in the Welsh Orchestra of the British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC). In 1954 he began working as an economist at the Metal Box Company.
In 1955 he married Kathleen "Kitty" Epstein Freud, the daughter of the sculptor and draftsman Jacob Epstein and divorced wife of the painter Lucian Freud . His father-in-law Jacob Epstein used his facial features for the Archangel Michael in his bronze statue of St Michael's Victory over the Devil .
Treasury staff and university professors
Between 1956 and 1970 he was a member of the economic staff of the Chancellor of the Exchequer . He earned a reputation for his nervous but brilliant predictions of the economic situation and was considered "one of the most capable economists in government" by Harold Wilson . The mid- 1960s , he was initially responsible for short-term forecasts, and since 1967, Deputy Director of the Economic Department of the Treasury (year Treasury ).
He was particularly involved in planning the devaluation of the pound sterling in 1967. At that time the growth of production in Great Britain was rather slow compared to other European countries. On November 18, 1967, the pound sterling lost 17 percent of its value as the British government refused to accept deflationary measures demanded by the International Monetary Fund to increase lending. The devaluation of the pound sterling and the enormous loss of value of the US dollar against the gold standard led to the final collapse of the Bretton Woods system in the early 1970s .
In 1970 he became Lecturer and Head of the Department of Applied Economics at the University of Cambridge through the mediation of Nicholas Kaldor .
He was also a Fellow at King's College London , where he designed a new system for bookkeeping and financial planning .
Within the faculty he was the founder of the Cambridge Economic Policy Group, which published an annual economic report from 1971 until the group was dissolved after the unforeseen funding cut by the Economic and Social Research Council in 1982.
In doing so, however, he quickly lost faith in the economic forecasts he had previously carried out for the treasury. In particular, his opinion that Great Britain should reduce its lack of competitiveness by staying away from the common market and setting up import quotas was rejected by all sides.
As a university lecturer, he began a series of attacks on the economic policies of the Labor Party and Conservative Party governments in the 1970s , which earned him the nickname " Cassandra of the Fens " (The Cassandra of the Fens). His warnings of impending economic crises were uniformly pessimistic , albeit partially logical. He was one of the few economists who predicted the end of the 1972-1974 Heath - Barber boom. When he made the (accurate) forecast in 1977 that Britain would have more than three million unemployed by the mid- 1980s , few economists shared his view.
However, during the boom in the mid-1980s, his bleak projections were commonly viewed as grotesque. This also led to the ignoring of his thesis that an emerging excess of private spending above private income should be corrected and that a recession would be the inevitable consequence of this.
In addition, he was director of the Royal Opera House in Covent Garden from 1976 to 1987 and was able to find his way back to his musical passion.
In 1980 he was appointed professor .
The debacle that the sterling crisis of " Black Wednesday led" in 1992, prompted him to draft an article with the opening words "The crazy fools" ( The Crazy Fools ). On the other hand, this crisis led to his partial rehabilitation : the accuracy of his predictions led the conservative Chancellor of the Exchequer, Norman Lamont, to appoint him to his advisory board of the six wise men .
In 1993 he retired as professor at the University of Cambridge. Nonetheless, he continued to serve on the Treasury Department's Independent Economic Forecaster until 1995, when he joined the Levy Institute in New York .
In 1998 he was among the first to warn of the growing imbalance in the global economy , which (in his opinion) could no longer be stopped by the growing household debt in the United States of America .
He was also one of the critics of Chancellor of the Exchequer Gordon Brown , who wanted to solve the problems of macroeconomic governance by developing the monetary policy of the Bank of England and adopting the so-called Golden Rule of a cyclical balanced budget . In 2005, he foresaw that discretionary fiscal policy would return.
He worked with Marc Lavoie to create the textbook Monetary Economics: An Integrated Approach to Money, Income, Production and Wealth , which was published in 2007, from the ideas for stock-flow consistent models that had been elaborated in various publications since the early 1990s .
Publications
Godley was the author of numerous specialist books and articles. His most significant publications include:
- Wynne Godley / T. Francis Cripps: Macroeconomics , 1983, ISBN 0192153587
- Wynne Godley / Marc Lavoie: Monetary Economics: An Integrated Approach to Credit, Money, Income, Production and Wealth , 2007, ISBN 0230500552
Web links
- Professor Wynne Godley: economist . The Times, May 17, 2010
- Wynne Godley obituary. Economist with a flair for anticipating and responding to crises . The Guardian, May 20, 2010
- Professor Wynne Godley . The Daily Telegraph, May 21, 2010
- Wynne Godley, British economist, died on May 13th, aged 83 . The Economist, May 27, 2010
Individual evidence
- ^ "A brief History of the Bretton Woods System" Article by MJ Stephey, October 21, 2008 on time.com. Retrieved on November 24, 2009 ( page no longer available , search in web archives ) Info: The link was automatically marked as defective. Please check the link according to the instructions and then remove this notice.
- ^ Wynne Godley and Marc Lavoie, 2007. Monetary Economics: An Integrated Approach to Credit, Money, Income, Production and Wealth , Palgrave MacMillan. ISBN 0-230-50055-2 .
- ↑ New Directions in Monetary Economics: An Interview with Marc Lavoie - Part I , nakedcapitalism.com, June 19, 2012.
| personal data | |
|---|---|
| SURNAME | Godley, Wynne |
| ALTERNATIVE NAMES | Godley, Wynne Alexander Hugh (full name) |
| BRIEF DESCRIPTION | English oboist and economist |
| DATE OF BIRTH | September 2, 1926 |
| PLACE OF BIRTH | London |
| DATE OF DEATH | May 13, 2010 |