Lawrence Klein

Origins and early life

Lawrence Robert Klein was born in Omaha, Nebraska, on 14 September 1920, the son of Leo Byron Klein and Blanche Monheit, both born in the Middle West, and graduated from Omaha Central High School in 1938.

Work and career

When he won the Nobel in 1980, the Jewish Telegraphic Agency announced it as the prize of a Jewish scientist, whose forebears had come from Austria, Poland and Alsace-Lorraine to settle in Nebraska and Iowa, and who had lectured at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem in 1964. Marked by the Great Depression, he took his degree in economics at Berkeley in 1942 and his doctorate at MIT in 1944, as Paul Samuelson's first doctoral student.

At the Cowles Commission in Chicago he took up Jan Tinbergen's early attempts at an econometric model of the United States, and an early model of his rightly foresaw an upturn, not a depression, at the end of the war. There he married the economist Sonia Adelson, and in 1947 he left to spend a year in Oslo with Ragnar Frisch and Trygve Haavelmo. At the University of Michigan he built the Klein-Goldberger model with his student Arthur Goldberger, then spent four years at Oxford before joining the University of Pennsylvania in 1958.

Recognition

There he developed the Wharton models, received the John Bates Clark Medal in 1959, funded students and research by selling forecasts, and in 1968 helped launch Project LINK, which joined the models of many countries into one model of the world economy. He received the 1980 Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences alone, “for the creation of econometric models and the application to the analysis of economic fluctuations and economic policies”.

He went on to bring modern econometrics to China, taught at Penn until 1991, and died at his home in Gladwyne, Pennsylvania, on 20 October 2013, at the age of ninety-three.