Celebrating Wynne Godley at 100
The Levy Institute remembers Distinguished Scholar Wynne Godley during what would have been his 100th birthday month. His work is much appreciated, and his presence dearly missed.
Longtime head of the Institute’s Macro-Modeling Team, Wynne Godley was one of the six “wise men” of the British Treasury and developed the Stock-Flow Consistent Model, a framework so influential that Goldman Sachs’ chief economist called it “the most important chart in the world.” His work examined the strategic prospects of the US, UK, and global economies, using accounting-based macroeconomic models to illuminate structural imbalances. In 2000, Godley and Marc Lavoie presented a simple growth model grounded in stock-flow monetary accounting, demonstrating how credit, money, equities, and real capital connect periods of economic activity in coherent sequences. The year before the 2007-9 Great Recession broke out in the United States, Wynne Godley and Gennaro Zezza warned of the decisive importance of the path of lending for the medium-term future of the US economy.
- Read Gennaro Zezza and Marc Lavoie’s Sound Accounting and Uncompromising Vision: Remembering Wynne Godley at 100.
- Listen in on Scholars Gennaro Zezza, Michalis Nikiforos, and Claudio H. Dos Santos as they discuss the life and legacy of Wynne Godley for the Levy at 40 Podcast Episode.
- Read Debt and Lending, A Cri de Coeur, Godley and Gennaro Zezza’s famous Policy Analysis from 2006, which used Stock-Flow Consistent (SFC) macroeconomic modeling to expose how deeply unstable the U.S. economy had become immediately before the 2007-2008 Recession.
- Read Godley’s 1999 landmark report, “Seven Unsustainable Processes“, which challenged the prevailing optimism about the US economy’s prospects, arguing that its expansion rested on unsustainable processes that would eventually trigger prolonged recession.
- Read his 1998 paper with Anwar Shaikh that identified an inconsistency at the heart of the standard macro model’s treatment of the distribution of income.
