Michał Kalecki’s Capitalist Dynamics from Today’s Perspective

Fifty years ago, I sat in the first row of Michał Kalecki’s lecture courses, both on capitalist dynamics and on the growth of the socialist economy, at the Warsaw SGPiS (the Higher School of Planning and Statistics, as it then was, now the Higher School of Commerce). At the time there was a thriving school of economics in Poland, with eminent representatives — besides Kalecki — such as Oskar Lange, Kazimierz Łaski, Włodzimierz Brus, Ignacy Sachs and many others. In 1962, freshly graduated in Economics from the University of Rome ‘La Sapienza’ and queueing for a scholarship to go to Cambridge the following year, I decided to go to Warsaw in the meantime, braving the coldest winter of the century, and learn more in corpore vili about comparative economic systems, which were to become my main research and teaching interest of a lifetime.