Alvin Hansen Symposium on Public Policy at Harvard University

In 1967, in his eightieth year, Alvin Hansen received the American Economics Association’s France E. Walker medal. James Tobin, in presenting this award described him as follows:”Alvin H. Hansen, a gentle revolutionary who has lived to see his cause triumphant and his heresies orthodox, an untiring scholar whose example and influence have fruitfully changed the directions of his science, a political economist who has reformed policies and institutions in his own country and elsewhere without any power save the force of his ideas. From his boyhood on the South Dakota prairie, Alvin Hansen has believed that knowledge can improve the condition of man. In the integrity of that faith he has had the courage never to close his mind and to seek and speak the truth wherever it might lead. But Professor Hansen is to be honored with as much affection as respect. Generation after generation, students have left his seminar and his study not only enlightened but also inspired—inspired with some of his enthusiastic conviction that economics is a science for the service of mankind.”A symposium is held at Harvard University in Alvin Hansen’s honor, and the papers and discussions from these symposia are published by the MIT Press.

Series editor: Benjamin M. Friedman