Nobel laureate and econometrician Lawrence R. Klein to speak
Nobel Prize laureate and econometrician Lawrence R. Klein will spend a week in residence at Bates College, where he will deliver two public presentations about his research, at 4 p.m. Monday, Sept. 30, and at 7:30 p.m. Wednesday, Oct. 2 in the Keck Classroom (G52) of Pettengill Hall. The public is invited to attend these talks free of charge.
Klein’s Sept. 30 talk, titled The Estimation of China’s Economic Growth Rate, will be followed by a reception from 5:30 to 6:30 p.m. His second lecture is titled Psychological Dimensions of Consumer Behavior Since Sept. 11, 2001.
Klein, the Benjamin Franklin Professor of Economics and Finance (emeritus) at the University of Pennsylvania, received the 1980 Nobel Prize in Economics for the creation of econometric models and in the application to the analysis of economic fluctuations and economic policies. Econometrics applies mathematical and statistical techniques to economics.
After winning the Nobel Prize, Klein told The Boston Globe he had been influenced early in his career by these words of the 19th-century English physicist Lord Kelvin: “When you can measure what you are speaking about, and express it in numbers, you know something about it; when you cannot measure it, when you cannot express it in numbers, your knowledge is of a meager and unsatisfactory kind; it may be the beginning of knowledge, but you have scarcely, in your thoughts, advanced to the stage of science. . . .”
Klein has constructed statistical models of the United States and other countries. At Penn, where he spent most of his career, he founded the Wharton Econometric Forecasting Associates and served as a principal investigator for Project LINK, which combined models from countries throughout the world for studying international trade, payments and global activity. He also served on the faculties of the University of Chicago, the University of Michigan and Oxford University.
An economic policy adviser to government and industry, Klein coordinated the economic task force for Jimmy Carter’s 1976 presidential campaign. The director and chairman of W.P. Carey & Co., he has written numerous articles and books, including his definitive 1947 study, The Keynesian Revolution, and has edited various scholarly journals.
Klein’s Bates visit is sponsored by the Dean of the Faculty and the Department of Economics.
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