Wynne Godley

Distinguished Scholar Wynne Godley, longtime head of the Institute’s Macro-Modeling Team, died May 13, 2010. He was 83.

Much of Godley’s work focused on the strategic prospects for the US, UK, and world economies, and the use of accounting macroeconomic models to reveal structural imbalances. He published extensively. His 2007 book Monetary Economics: An Integrated Approach to Credit, Money, Income, Production, and Wealth (with Marc Lavoie) is an elaboration of his classic textbook Macroeconomics, written in 1983 with Francis Cripps. With it, Godley aimed to revive the tradition of macroeconomics practiced by the original Cambridge Keynesians, in combination with the theory of asset allocation pioneered by James Tobin.

Godley was born in London in 1926 and educated at Oxford (PPE, 1947) and the Paris Conservatoire de Musique. He was briefly a professional oboist. He served in the Economic Section of HM Treasury from 1956 to 1970, and for more than two decades was director of the Department of Applied Economics at the University of Cambridge; he was named professor emeritus in 1994. He was appointed to the British Treasury’s Panel of Independent Forecasters—the so-called “Six Wise Men”—in 1992, and in 1994 became affiliated with the Levy Institute.

From 2001 to 2005, Godley was senior visiting research scholar at the Cambridge Endowment for Research in Finance, part of the University’s Judge Institute of Management, and he remained active in the field up until his death. An extensive obituary was published in the Times of London on May 17, 2010. “Wynne Godley,” it read, “was the most insightful macroeconomic forecaster of his generation.”