Profile Major Works Resources

Robert W. Clower, 1926-2011

Portrait of R.W. Clower

American economist, one of the founders of Disequilibrium Keynesianism in the late 1960s.

Born in Pullman, Washington.  He served in the US Army during World War II (he landed at Omaha beach the day after the D-Day).  After the war, Clower attended Washington State University, earning his B.A. and M.A.  Selected as a Rhodes Scholar, Clower went on to complete his studies at Brasenose College, Oxford University, studying under John Hicks.

Clower returned to the United States in 1952.  After a stint at WSU, Clower went on to become professor at Northwestern University in 1958.  While at Northwestern, Clower came in contact with Axel Leijonhufvud, a student at the time (but apparently, Clower was not his mentor).  In 1971, Clower moved to UCLA (again, with Leijonhufvud) before settling down at the University of South Carolina in 1986. 

Robert Clower's early work on stocks and flows indicated that something was indeed amiss in the orthodox "Neoclassical-Keynesian Synthesis". In 1965, Clower produced his famous article "The Keynesian Counterrevolution" which underlined the inconsistent manner in which Neoclassical economics and Keynesian theory had been synthesised. He highlighted the absence of a microeconomically-founded Keynesian theory. Among the several resolutions he proposed was a reconstruction of microeconomics to account for the constraints imposed by effective demand - the "Dual Decision Hypothesis". The famous "Clower Constraint" (or "Cash-In-Advance Constraint") was introduced by Clower in 1967 as an expression of the effective demand constraint. The outcome of Clower's theory was a "disequilibrium" approach to a Walras-Keynes synthesis. The work of Axel Leijonhufvud and the early work of Robert Barro employed Clower's approach. The European "Non-Walrasian" school of macroeconomics also formalized and extended several of Clower's propositions.

 

  

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Major works of Robert W. Clower

  • "An Investigation into the Dynamics of Investment", 1954, AER.
  • Introduction to Mathematical Economics, with D.W. Bushaw, 1957.
  • "On the Invariance of Demand for Cash and Other Assets" with M.L. Burnstein, 1960, RES.
  • "The Keynesian Counterrevolution: A theoretical appraisal", 1965, in Hahn and Matthews, editors, Theory of Interest Rates.
  • "A Reconsideration of the Microfoundations of Monetary Theory", 1967, Western EJ.
  • "What Traditional Monetary Theory Really Wasn't?", 1969, Canadian JE.
  • "Say's Principle: What it means and doesn't mean", with A. Leijonhufvud, 1973, Intermountain ER.
  • "Reflections on the Keynesian Perplex", 1975, ZfN.
  • "The Coordination of Economic Activities: A Keynesian Perspective", with A. Leijonhufvud, 1975, AER.
  • "The Anatomy of Monetary Theory", 1977, AER.
  • "The Transactions Theory of the Demand for Money: A reconsideration", with P.W. Howitt, 1978, JPE.
  • "Economics as an Inductive Science", 1994, Southern EJ.
  • Economic Doctrine and Method, 1995.
  • "Taking Markets Seriously: Groundwork for a Post Walrasian macroeconomics", with P.W. Howitt, 1996, in Colander, editor, Beyond Microfoundations.
HET

 
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Resources on Robert Clower

 

 
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