Charles Kindleberger is a Ford International Professor of Economics, Emeritus, at the Massechusetts Institute of Technology and visiting Sacher Professor of Economics, Brandeis University. His central focus has been in International Economics and the History of Economics. He wrote on the Depression Era of 1929 to 1939, his goal being to pinpoint the triggering factors of this catastrophic economic event. He believed that the lack of world economic leadership was the main triggering factor. "According to Kindleberger, Britain provided leadership before World War I. It fostered global trade by keeping its markets open, promoted expansion be making overseas investments, and prevented financial crisis with emergency loans. After World War II the United States played this role. But between the wars no country did, and the depression fed on itself....No country did enough to halt banking crises, and the entire industrial world adopted protectionist measures in attempts to curtail imports....The protectionism put an extra brake on world trade just when countries should have been promoting it."
The following is an excerpt from his chapter "My Working Philosophy" in Eminent Economists, Their Life Philosophies, by Michael Szenberg:
"...I am troubled that the economics profession seems to be getting corrupted by success, and greedier. Money is needed for research where equipment is needed, or computer time, or travel, or to free time for teaching so as to enable scholars to concentrate more fully on research....Competition for stars, both established and in embryo, takes the form of more and more time for research and less and less for teaching, subverting a major, perhaps the major, purpose of the university....More and more, it seems to me, scholars get grants for what should be their ordinary research....Economics teaches competition, and too often practices it in dysfunctional ways. At one university, not MIT, it was said that the graduate students deliberately misshelved books on reading lists before examinations to ensure monopoly returns for the practicing individuals. That is saddening if true. Learning and teaching are cooperative endeavors at all levels, among students, among instructors, between instructors and students, and in the wider world among scholars with similar interest, exchanging papers, reprints, ideas. Micro-sociology is important. Individuals in a given culture will behave as do their peers, working hard if those about them do, or taking it easy if that is what is done. "
Works by Charles P. Kindleberger :
- International Economics
- A Financial History of Western Europe
- "My Working Philosophy" , Eminent Economists, Their Life Philosophies
- The World in Depression, 1929-1939
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