Alvin Hansen as a Creative Economic Theorist

Much has been written about Alvin Hansen, the teacher and scholar by others in this symposium and by me elsewhere.' My purpose here is to describe his contributions to the corpus of economic analysis: when all personal influences decay exponentially through time as they must, there remains imperishably locked in the developed corpus of a subject the value-added contributions of a scholar. Men are mortal. Their theorems and inductive inferences are permanent. From the early 1930's on, Alvin Hansen had an international reputation among economists. He was also of renown to the general public, to governmental officials, and to international agencies. His oral and written testimony was widely sought; his tireless pen wrote not only for his academic colleagues and for students, but also for the wider public at large., At Harvard, in the policy areas of macroeconomics, despite his nonaggressive manner, he came to overshadow his colleagues in an almost embarrassing manner; considering the strategic importance of Harvard at that juncture in history, Hansen through his hold on students wielded a tremendous influence on the course of modern economic stabilization policy. (His colleagues included, to name but two scholars important in their own right, Joseph Schumpeter and Sumner Slichter: for different reasons, neither of these developed a coterie of followers to amplify his own influence. And the important influence of John Williams, both in his own person and through that minority of able students who did march primarily to his beat, was often by way of contrast and qualification to the bolder theses of Hansen and his circle. Gottfried Haberler provided a critical audit that was both creative and valuable.) This public extra-academic stature of Hansen I particularly stress. Its bright light tends to obscure his analytical importance as an economist. Anyone who has studied the parallel career of Gustav Cassel will realize that, precisely because Cassel came to be overpraised by the public toward whom so much of his writing was ad-