Lawrence Klein

He met and married Sonia Adelson at the Cowles Commission and had 3 daughters, Hannah, Rebecca and Rachel and a son, Jonathan, with her.

Lawrence Klein died in his home in Gladwyne, Pennsylvania, USA on October 20, 2013 at the age of 93.

Lawrence Klein was born in Omaha, Nebraska on September 14, 1920 to Leo Byron Klein and Blanche Monheit who were both from the ‘American Middle West’.

He had an elder brother and a younger sister.

His early education took place at a public school in Omaha. His high school training helped him to become proficient in English, history, languages and mathematics.

He grew up during the Great Depression which had a profound impact on his future life and career. His experiences during this period helped him build models that would successfully predict the pre-war and post-war economic condition in America.

He graduated from the ‘Los Angeles City College’ where he studied calculus and other subjects.

After receiving his PhD from MIT he joined the ‘Cowles Commission for Research in Economics’ (currently the ‘Cowles Foundation’), which was located at the ‘University of Chicago’. While working here he built an economic model by using an earlier one developed by Dutch economist Jan Tinbergen as a starting point to analyze and forecast the impact of government policies and prevailing conditions on the American economy.

After the end of the Second World War he used his econometric model to correctly predict, against majority opinion, an economic upturn rather than a depression.

He was briefly a member of the Communist Party in America from 1946 to 1947 which caused problems in his career later.

He moved to the ‘University of Michigan’ and developed even more complicated and bigger economic models which helped him predict the future economic conditions in a better way. During this period he built the famous Klein-Goldberger economic model with the help of a graduate student, Arthur S. Goldberger.

In 1954 he had to move to the ‘Oxford University’ in England as he was not allowed to stay on at the ‘University of Michigan’ during the McCarthy era due to his previous Communist Party association. He built a model for the British economy while he was at Oxford. He also helped in developing a model for the ‘British Savings Surveys’ which was based on the ‘Michigan Surveys’.

Lawrence Klein published his first book ‘Economic Fluctuations in the United States, 1921-1941’ in 1950 followed by another book written in collaboration with Arthur S. Goldberger titled ‘Econometric Model of the United States, 1929 -1952’ in 1955.

The second edition of his third book ‘The Keynesian Revolution’ came out in 1966.

He wrote ‘The Brookings Model’ with Gary Fromm and published it in 1975, while his next book ‘The Economics of Supply and Demand’ was published in 1983.