Change, Continuity, and Originality in Kaldor’s Monetary Theory

For Harry G. Johnson, perhaps the most famous Canadian economist, Nicholas Kaldor and John Hicks were ‘illiterate monetary policy amateurs’ (1978, p. 126). It is well known that Milton Friedman (1970) in his response to Kaldor’s ‘New Monetarism’, called him a Johnny-come-lately. In much more diplomatic terms, this was also James Tobin’s more recent assessment of Kaldor’s involvement in the monetarist debates (1983, p. 36). On the other hand, British authors, such as A. P. Thirlwall (1983, p. 43) and Grahame Thompson (1981, p. 68), have claimed that Kaldor’s memoranda on money presented the most effective repudiation of key monetarist assumptions.