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Frank H. Hahn, 1925-2013
Cambridge general equilibrium theorist.
The perennial renegade, Frank H. Hahn spent most of his professional life at Cambridge as virtually the sole Neo-Walrasian member of an ardently Keynesian department. Perhaps his socialization with the irascible critics of Neoclassical economics, such as Joan Robinson, imbibed in him a considerable degree of sobriety and skepticism towards the very Neoclassical economics in which he was a master.
Frank H. Hahn was born in Berlin, Germany. The family moved to Prague in 1931, then to England in 1938, where Hahn completed his studies at Bournemouth school. Hahn served as an RAF navigator during WWII, and, after the war, enrolled at the LSE to complete his studies. At LSE, Hahn came under the influence of John Hicks and Nicholas Kaldor. Hahn's Ph.D. thesis on income distribution, supervised by Kaldor, was very "Kaldorian"/Cambridge School, and yielded a couple of papers. (it was only published in full in 1972.
Hahn joined the faculty at the University of Birmingham in 1948, then a rising economics department. Hahn credits his mathematically-oriented colleague at Birmingham, W.T. Gorman, as his greatest influence. Hahn soon shed his Kaldorian garb and emerged as a rising Neo-Walrasian general equilibrium theorist. He remained at Birmingham for ten years. After a visiting year at MIT in 1959-60, Frank H. Hahn moved to Cambridge University, where he was elected fellow at the newly-created graduate-oriented Churchill College. At the time, the university was dominated by the Keynesian giants of the Cambridge School, like Joan Robinson, Richard F. Kahn and his old mentor Nicholas Kaldor. Although Hahn's embrace of the Neo-Walrasian research program was ideologically at odds with the Cambridge approach, their interaction was intellectually stimulating and challenging for both.
Frank Hahn moved back to the LSE in 1967, as professor of economics, and was joined there by Gorman. They reorganized the LSE department on more modern lines, and brought in Michio Morishima and Amartya Sen. In 1972, Hahn moved back to Cambridge, but the old giants had now gone into retirement, and the atmosphere become more fractious and political. In 1976, Hahn brought in a substantial fifteen-year grant from ESRC, and used it to bring in a steady stream of researchers interested in combining general equilibrium theory, uncertainty theory and monetary theory. The "missing markets" research program virtually grew out of Hahn's Cambridge seminar.
Frank H. Hahn viewed the Neo-Walrasian research programme without illusions - remaining one of its most ardent and articulate defenders but, unique among Neoclassical economists, also acknowledging and stressing its limits clearly. (e.g. 1970, 1973, 1974, 1980, 1981, 1982, 1985) Nonetheless Hahn remained an critic of all systems - Monetarist, New Classical, Neo-Ricardian, Post Keynesian, all. But he was not a dogmatic nihilist: if his methodological position could be summed up in a phrase, it would might be "let a hundred flowers bloom - but take none too seriously."
His positive contributions are many: his work can be more-or-less divided into concerns over general equilibrium (1971), the tatonnement and non-tatonnement stability of multi-market equilibrium (1958, 1962, 1970, 1982), the theory of money in sequence economies (1965, 1971, 1973), the theory of economic growth with heterogeneous stores of value (1966, 1968, 1969, 1973), conjectural equilibria (1977) and combining all these with each other.
Frank H. Hahn retired from Cambridge in 1992, and took up an appointment at the University of Siena, Italy. He continued there until 2000, then retired in Cambridge. Hahn passed away on 29 January, 2013.
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