Charles P. Kindleberger

Kindleberger was born in New York City on October 12, 1910. He graduated from the Kent School in 1928, the University of Pennsylvania in 1932, and received a PhD from Columbia University in 1937.{{Cite book|last=Cohen|first=Benjamin J.|url=https://books.google.com/books?id=H79WVDwMzCEC|title=International Political Economy: An Intellectual History|date=2008|publisher=Princeton University Press|isbn=978-0-691-13569-4|pages=66–68|language=en}}

During the summer of 1931, he traveled to Europe and attended a seminar hosted by Salvador de Madariaga, but, when the latter was appointed Spanish Ambassador to the United States, Kindleberger attended lectures at the Graduate Institute of International Studies in Geneva led by Sir Alfred Zimmern.

{{cite book|first = Charles| last = Kindleberger| title = Le Monde en Dépression : 1929-1939 (French translation of The World in Depression: 1929–1939)| publisher = Economica| date = 1986| place = Paris}}

While writing his thesis, Kindleberger was employed temporarily in the international division of United States Treasury under the direction of Harry Dexter White. He then joined the Federal Reserve Bank of New York full-time (1936–1939). Subsequently, he worked at the Bank for International Settlements in Switzerland (1939–1940), the Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System (1940–1942). During World War II, he served in the Office of Strategic Services (OSS). From 1945 to 1947 he was Chief of the Division of Economic Affairs of Germany and Austria at the United States Department of State.{{cite news

| title = Charles P. Kindleberger

| newspaper = The Tech

| url = http://tech.mit.edu/V123/N29/29kindleberger.29n.html

| date = 9 July 2003

| pages = 12 (career to 1948), 15, ("great lesson of the interwar period"), 16 (Council on Foreign Relations)

| access-date = 21 September 2014

| archive-date = March 16, 2012

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Kindleberger was a leading architect of the Marshall Plan. In 1945–1947 he served at the Department of State as acting director of the Office of Economic Security Policy, and briefly from 1947 to 1948 as counselor for the European Recovery Program.

He described his around-the-clock work to develop and launch the Marshall Plan with singular passion in a 1973 interview:

We were conscious of a great sense of excitement about the plan. Marshall himself was a great, great man—funny, odd but great—Olympian in his moral quality. We'd stay up all night, night after night. The first work ever done that I know about in economics on computers used the Pentagon's computers at night for the Marshall Plan. I had a tremendous sense of gratification from working so hard on it.

{{cite news

| url = http://newsoffice.mit.edu/2003/kindleberger

| title = MIT Professor Kindleberger dies at 92

| publisher = MIT News

| date = 7 July 2003

| access-date = 21 September 2014}}

Though he himself was spared anti-communist investigation during the 1950s, he later recalled:

...I worked in the Treasury under Harry Dexter White. That gave me a lot of trouble later on because he got in trouble, and anybody who was infected by him got into trouble, too. The FBI listened to my phone calls and things I said in the course of my work at the State Department and gave gossip and some misrepresentations to columnists like George Sokolsky. J. Edgar Hoover fed them such gossip.

{{cite book

| first = Randall E.

| last = Parker

| title = Reflections on the Great Depression

| date = 2002

| publisher = Edward Elgar Publishing (UK)

| url = https://books.google.com/books?id=Y-g4AgAAQBAJ&pg=PA87

| page = 87| isbn = 9781843765509

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After 1948, Kindleberger was appointed Professor of International Economics at MIT. He retired from a full-time position in 1976 and continued as a senior lecturer until full retirement from teaching in 1981.

He partook in working groups of the Council on Foreign Relations. He later held the position of Ford International Professor of Economics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

• 1944 Bronze Star
• 1945 Legion of Merit
• 1954 elected member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences{{Cite web |title=Charles Poor Kindleberger |url=https://www.amacad.org/person/charles-poor-kindleberger |access-date=2022-05-05 |website=American Academy of Arts & Sciences |language=en}}
• 1966 Dr. h.c., University of Paris
• 1977 Dr. h.c., University of Ghent
• 1978 Harms Prize, Institut für Weltwirtschaft, Kiel
• 1984 Dr. Sci. h.c., University of Pennsylvania
• 1987 elected member of the American Philosophical Society{{Cite web |title=APS Member History |url=https://search.amphilsoc.org/memhist/search?creator=Charles+P.+Kindleberger&title=&subject=&subdiv=&mem=&year=&year-max=&dead=&keyword=&smode=advanced |access-date=2022-05-05 |website=search.amphilsoc.org}}
• 1989 Bicentennial Medal, Georgetown University{{cite web

| title = Charles P. Kindleberger

| publisher = MIT

| url = http://economics.mit.edu/faculty/kindleberger/

| access-date = 21 September 2014

| archive-date = March 29, 2020

| archive-url = https://web.archive.org/web/20200329204511/http://economics.mit.edu/faculty/kindleberger/

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Kindleberger was married to Sarah Miles Kindleberger for 59 years. They had four children: Charles P. Kindleberger III,[https://www.legacy.com/us/obituaries/stltoday/name/charles-kindleberger-obituary?id=1861941] “St. Louis Post-Dispatch” obituary (August 30, 2020) ) Richard S. Kindleberger (a reporter for the Boston Globe), Sarah Kindleberger, and E. Randall Kindleberger.

{{cite news

| url = http://www.economist.com/node/1923462

| title = Economics Focus: Of Manias, Panics and Crashes

| newspaper = Economist

| date = 17 July 2003

| access-date = 21 September 2014}}

He died of a stroke on July 7, 2003, in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

Kindleberger wrote 30 books: International Short-Term Capital Movements in 1937, and the others beginning in 1950.

As an economic historian, Kindleberger used a narrative approach to knowledge, not based on mathematical models. In the preface to The Great Depression 1929-1939, he wrote: "It's the story simply told, without tables of squares..."

His book Manias, Panics, and Crashes is still widely used in Master of Business Administration (MBA) programs in the United States.

{{main|Hegemonic stability theory}}

In his 1973 and 1986 book The World in Depression 1929–1939, Kindleberger advances an idiosyncratic, internationalist view of the causes and nature of the Great Depression, which concludes that a world hegemon is necessary for a generally stable world economy.{{Cite book|last=Spruyt|first=Hendrik|url=https://books.google.com/books?id=3BzhDwAAQBAJ|title=The World Imagined: Collective Beliefs and Political Order in the Sinocentric, Islamic and Southeast Asian International Societies|date=2020|publisher=Cambridge University Press|isbn=978-1-108-49121-1|pages=21|language=en}}{{Cite journal |last=Haberler |first=Gottfried |date=1974 |title=Review of The World in Depression 1929-1939. |url=https://www.jstor.org/stable/2721959 |journal=Journal of Economic Literature |volume=12 |issue=2 |pages=490–493 |jstor=2721959 |issn=0022-0515}}{{Cite journal |last=Schwartz |first=Anna J. |date=1975 |title=Review of The World in Depression, 1929-1939 |url=https://www.jstor.org/stable/1833286 |journal=Journal of Political Economy |volume=83 |issue=1 |pages=231–237 |doi=10.1086/260319 |jstor=1833286 |issn=0022-3808|url-access=subscription }}{{Cite journal |last=Lewis |first=W. Arthur |date=1975 |title=Review of The World in Depression 1929-1939 |url=https://www.jstor.org/stable/202837 |journal=The Journal of Interdisciplinary History |volume=6 |issue=1 |pages=172–174 |doi=10.2307/202837 |jstor=202837 |issn=0022-1953|url-access=subscription }} Blaming the peculiar length and depth of the Depression on the hesitancy of the US in taking over leadership of the world economy when Britain was no longer up to the role after World War I, he concludes that "for the world economy to be stabilized, there has to be a stabilizer{{mdash}}one stabilizer", by which, in the context of the interwar years at least, he means the United States. In the last chapter, "An Explanation of the 1929 Depression", Kindleberger lists the five responsibilities the US would have had to assume in order to stabilize the world economy:

1. maintaining a relatively open market for distress goods;
2. providing countercyclical, or at least stable, long-term, lending;
3. policing the relative stability of exchange rates;
4. ensuring the coordination of nations' macroeconomic policies;
5. acting as a lender of last resort by discounting, or otherwise providing liquidity, in a financial crisis.

Kindleberger was highly skeptical of Milton Friedman and Anna Schwartz's monetarist view of the causes of the Depression, seeing it as too narrow and perhaps dogmatic, and dismisses out of hand what he characterized as Paul Samuelson's "accidental" or "fortuitous" interpretation. The World in Depression was praised by John Kenneth Galbraith as "the best book on the subject".{{citation needed|date=March 2023}}

For Kindleberger, the main problem with international institutions is that they provide public goods whose provision states are incentivized to free-ride on.{{Cite book|last=Norrlof|first=Carla|url=https://www.cambridge.org/core/books/americas-global-advantage/29F591B11AD3CCFDA25F7ED7D9191B55|title=America's Global Advantage: US Hegemony and International Cooperation|date=2010|publisher=Cambridge University Press|isbn=978-0-521-76543-5|pages=30–31|doi=10.1017/cbo9780511676406}} Following Mancur Olson, Kindleberger argued that the solution to the free-riding problem was to have an actor who was large enough (a hegemon) and willing to bear the cost of cooperation alone.

• International Short-term Capital Movements (NY: Columbia University Press, 1937)
• International Economics (Irwin, 1953)
• Economic Development (New York, 1958)
• Foreign Trade and the National Economy (Yale, 1962)
• Europa and the Dollar (Cambridge, Massachusetts, London, 1966)
• ''Europe's Postwar Growth. The Role of Labor Supply (Cambridge, Massachusetts, 1967)
• American Business Abroad (New Haven, London, 1969)
• The Benefits of International Money. Journal of International Economics 2 (Nov. 1972): 425–442.
• The World in Depression: 1929–1939 (University of California Press, 1973);{{cite journal|journal=Journal of Political Economy|volume=83|number=1|date=February 1975|title=Review of The World in Depression, 1929-1939 by Charles P. Kindleberger|author=Schwartz, Anna J.|author-link=Anna Schwartz|pages=231–237|doi=10.1086/260319}} {{cite book|title=revised and enlarged edition|year=1986|url=https://books.google.com/books?id=tXo6CAkhoroC|isbn=9780520055926|last1=Kindleberger|first1=Charles P.|publisher=University of California Press }}
• Manias, Panics, and Crashes: A History of Financial Crises (Macmillan, 1978)
• Historical Economics – Art or Science? (1990) (online book){{cite book| first = Charles| last = Kindleberger| title = Historical Economics – Art or Science?| publisher = University of California Press| date = 1990

| url = http://www.escholarship.org/editions/view?docId=ft287004zv;brand=ucpress}}{{cite journal|title=Review of Historical Economics - Art or Science by Charles P. Kindleberger|author=Sen, Gautam|volume=20|issue=2|year=1991|doi=10.1177/03058298910200020707|s2cid=143998451}}

• A Financial History of Western Europe (New York, 1984)
• World Economic Primacy: 1500 – 1990 (Oxford University Press, 1996)
• Centralization versus Pluralism (Copenhagen Business School Press, 1996)
• Economic Laws and Economic History (Cambridge University Press, 1997)

• Kindleberger Trap, theory developed by Joseph Nye.

{{Reflist}}

{{wikiquote}}

• [http://economics.mit.edu/faculty/kindleberger/ MIT Economics bio] {{Webarchive|url=https://web.archive.org/web/20200329204511/http://economics.mit.edu/faculty/kindleberger/ |date=March 29, 2020 }}
• [http://web.mit.edu/newsoffice/2003/kindleberger.html MIT obituary]
• Peter Temin (2008). "Kindleberger, Charles P. (1910–2003)." The New Palgrave Dictionary of Economics, 2nd ed. [http://www.dictionaryofeconomics.com/article?id=pde2008_K000073 Abstract.]
• {{Internet Archive author |sname= Charles Kindleberger}}

{{Presidents of the American Economic Association}}

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Category:1910 births

Category:2003 deaths

Category:Writers from New York City

Category:Military personnel from New York City

Category:People of the Office of Strategic Services

Category:20th-century American economists

Category:American economic historians

Category:Kent School alumni

Category:University of Pennsylvania alumni

Category:Columbia University alumni

Category:Presidents of the American Economic Association

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Category:Corresponding fellows of the British Academy

Category:Members of the American Philosophical Society