Nicholas Kaldor

"The [seminar in economic theory conducted by Hayek at the L.S.E. in the 1930s] was attended, it came to seem, by all of the economists of my generation — Nicky [Kaldor], Thomas Balogh, L. K. Jah, Paul Rosenstein-Rodan, the list could be indefinitely extended. The urge to participate (and correct Hayek) was ruthlessly competitive."

"The national predicament has obsessed public debate for five years now; all political discussion has revolved on it. In that time, innumerable unrelated or contradictory explanations for the crisis have been advanced by British economists. The most influential has doubtless been Kaldor’s, which attributes Britain’s post-war economic decline to a shortage of cheap labour from the primary sector, due to the uniquely rationalized English agriculture of the last century."

"In 1977 my wife and I and our two young children spent the first of many summers in the comfortable, rambling house of Nicky and Clarissa Kaldor at 2 Adams Road. Nicky, too, had worked with Keynes as a young man, and he loved discussing (or rather expounding) economics. He was then obsessed by the need to save the world from the evils of monetarism, and would develop this theme for many hours at a stretch. I would ask questions, which he probably attributed to ignorance or incompetence or both, but which gave him fresh opportunities to lambast Milton Friedman and other assorted neo-classical economists and free-trader. Nicky suffered from narcolepsy, and would often fall asleep in full flow, only to resume ten or fifteen minutes later at exactly the point he had left off. He was a wonderful and generous teacher and friend, and I learnt a great deal from these tutorials, though I had a strong intuition that he was fighting a losing battle against the forces of darkness."