James Tobin - Life and Career - Early Life

Early Life

Tobin was born on March 5, 1918 in Champaign, Illinois. His father was Louis Michael Tobin, (b.1899) a journalist working at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. His father had fought in World War I, was a member of the first Greek Organization at Illinois (Delta Tau Delta fraternity Beta Upsilon chapter), and was credited as the inventor of 'Homecoming'. His mother, Margaret Edgerton Tobin (b.1893), was a social worker. Tobin followed primary school at the University Laboratory High School of Urbana, Illinois, a laboratory school in the university's campus.

In 1935, on his father's advice, Tobin took the entrance exams for Harvard University. Despite no special preparation for the exams, he passed and was admitted with a national scholarship from the university. Here among the faculty he would meet Joseph Schumpeter, Alvin Hansen, Gottfried Haberler, Sumner Slichter, Seymour Harris, Edward Mason, Edward Chamberlin, John Kenneth Galbraith and Wassily Leontief. During his studies he first read Keynes' General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money, published in 1936. Tobin graduated summa cum laude in 1939 with a thesis centered on a critical analysis of Keynes' mechanism for introducing equilibrium "involuntary" unemployment. His first published article, in 1941, was based on this senior's thesis.

Tobin immediately started graduate studies, also at Harvard, earning his M.A. degree in 1940. His fellow graduate students included Paul Samuelson, Lloyd Metzler, Abram Bergson, Richard Musgrave and Richard M. Goodwin. In 1941, he interrupted graduate studies to work for the Office of Price Administration and Civilian Supply and the War Production Board in Washington, D.C.. The next year, after the United States entered World War II, he enrolled in the US Navy, spending the war as an officer on a destroyer. At the end of the war he returned to Harvard and resumed studies, receiving his Ph.D. in 1947 with a thesis on the consumption function written under the supervision of Joseph Schumpeter. In 1947 Tobin was elected a Junior Fellow of Harvard's Society of Fellows, which allowed him the freedom and funding to spend the next three years studying and doing research.

Read more about this topic:  James Tobin, Life and Career

Other articles related to "early life, early, life":

Zeenat Aman - Early Life
... Aman graduated from St ... Xavier's College, Mumbai and went to University of Southern California in Los Angeles, California for further studies on student aid ...
Joseph Conrad - Merchant Navy - British Voyages - Master
... with the peoples of the Malay Archipelago, why does this area loom so large in his early work? (Leaving aside The Rescue, whose completion was repeatedly ... destructive richness of tropical nature and the dreariness of human life within it accorded well with the pessimistic mood of his early works." After Johannes ... begin what Najder calls "the most traumatic journey of his life." After his November 1889 meeting with Thys, and before departing for the Congo, Conrad had again gone to Brussels, on 5 February 1890, where he made ...

Famous quotes containing the words life and/or early:

    As an example of just how useless these philosophers are for any practice in life there is Socrates himself, the one and only wise man, according to the Delphic Oracle. Whenever he tried to do anything in public he had to break off amid general laughter. While he was philosophizing about clouds and ideas, measuring a flea’s foot and marveling at a midge’s humming, he learned nothing about the affairs of ordinary life.
    Desiderius Erasmus (c. 1466–1536)

    It is easy to see that, even in the freedom of early youth, an American girl never quite loses control of herself; she enjoys all permitted pleasures without losing her head about any of them, and her reason never lets the reins go, though it may often seem to let them flap.
    Alexis de Tocqueville (1805–1859)