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##### June 14, 1994 OBITUARY ## Jan Tinbergen, Dutch Economist and Nobel Laureate, Dies at 91 ##### By PETER PASSELL Jan Tinbergen, the Dutch economist and Nobel laureate whose technical accomplishments and passion for effective public policy have led some to compare him with John Maynard Keynes, died last Thursday at the age of 91. News of his death was withheld by his family until yesterday to allow his funeral to take place without publicity. Mr. Tinbergen was trained as a physicist (he received a doctoral degree in the subject from the University of Leyden) but switched to economics in the late 1920's. During the early 1930's he was a professor of development planning at the University of Rotterdam and staff member of the Dutch Central Bureau of Statistics, where he applied mathematical techniques from the sciences to the question of why industrial output fluctuated in nonrandom ways -- the classic puzzle of the business cycle. As an adviser to the Social Democrats in the Netherlands, he was co-author of a plan for coping with the unemployment that had swept across Europe with the Great Depression. Econometric Models But Mr. Tinbergen first gained prominence with his pioneering efforts to build mathematical models of how whole economies work -- more specifically, how shocks like harvest failures or stock market crashes ricochet through an economy to influence employment, output and inflation. Others had used mathematics to add intellectual rigor to economic theory. But in the view of Paul Samuelson of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, "Tinbergen's combination of analytic versatility and good policy judgment" gave him an enormous advantage over most of his contemporaries. His model of the American economy, produced for the League of Nations in 1938, was the precursor of the giant computer models now used to forecast everything from the size of next year's budget deficit to the exchange rate of the Mexican peso. In the decade after World War II he served as the director of the Dutch Central Planning Bureau and as a key policy adviser to the country's Social Democrats. Indeed, his reputation as a guru of the democratic left was reportedly so sacrosanct that he was able to broker a wage pact between the Government and the country's militant labor unions that prevented mounting inflation. But he remained a world-class theorist and practitioner as well, helping to transform economics into a true policy science. One idea generally attributed to Mr. Tinbergen is that governments must have at least as many independent policy instruments as policy targets. For example, if a country wishes to control both the exchange rate of its currency and the rate of economic growth it must use a minimum of two levers -- say, the supply of money and the rate of deficit spending. That notion comes as second nature to the current generation of economists, who were put through their mathematical paces in graduate school. But it was a revelation at the time, an insight that had eluded the greats. In 1969 Mr. Tinbergen shared the first Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Science with the Norwegian Ragnar Frisch. And while his intellectual force as an economist was by this time largely spent, he remained, in the words of James Tobin of Yale, "a congenital do-gooder," who used his fame and prestige to further the cause of rational economic policy in the third world. Failure to help impoverished countries, he told an interviewer during his tenure as the chairman of the United Nations Development Planning Committee, would result in "mass unemployment, increasing internal conflicts, disaster." Part of his prescription was a sharp increase in development aid, a fashionable view at the time. But he had the foresight to understand that barriers to imports from the third world were potentially more important obstacles to growth. The voice of a man whom Mr. Samuelson dubbed a "humanist saint" was not stilled until his last days. Just a few weeks ago, Mr. Samuelson reports, he received a letter from the Dutch economist asking him to sign a petition calling for an end to the exploitation of children. The cause of Mr. Tinberg's death and information about his family were not immediately available.
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