Gerhard Tintner’s Review of Jan Tinbergen Selected Papers (1960)

Gerhard Tintner’s review assesses the selection of Tinbergen’s writings edited by L. H. Klaassen, L. M. Koyck, and H. J. Witteveen through five fields: business cycles, international economics, long-term development, income distribution, and economic systems. Its central judgment is that Tinbergen’s importance lies in connecting mathematical theory, statistical investigation, and practical economic policy. Tintner’s praise is therefore methodological as well as substantive: formal analysis earns its value through empirical verification and its capacity to clarify policy choices. The review moves from established contributions to business-cycle research toward the politically and ethically charged question of the optimum economic regime.

In the first field, Tintner discusses work on shipbuilding, equilibrium, cyclical movements, economic policy, and freight markets. He situates these essays alongside Tinbergen’s two League of Nations volumes on statistical testing, treating them together as evidence of exceptional achievement. His concise statement of their governing method supplies the review’s strongest unifying claim:

The judicious combination of mathematical theoretical investigations with empirical statistical treatment of concrete data is characteristic of Tinbergen's business cycle theories.

The emphasis falls on combination rather than on either mathematics or statistics alone. Tintner also stresses Tinbergen’s willingness to make concrete policy proposals, asking how many economists would expose their recommendations for 1936 to later scrutiny. He credits Tinbergen’s theoretical insight and statistical skill with comparatively successful predictions and proposals. Policy engagement is presented as a demanding test of economic understanding, not as a departure from scientific work.

The discussion of international economics extends this assessment to factor-price equalization, foreign-trade elasticities, integration, and customs unions. Tintner identifies total production and real income as the welfare concepts organizing the integration studies. Their significance lies partly in upsetting an uncomplicated presumption that integration necessarily benefits participating countries:

It is, for instance, shown under somewhat simplified conditions that economic integration may under certain circumstances, lead to a fall of real income in the countries concerned.

Both qualifications matter: Tintner reports a conditional result derived under simplifying assumptions, not a general indictment of integration. The achievement is to make trade policy answerable to explicit welfare criteria and analytical conditions. His reference to the Netherlands’ dependence on international trade contextualizes Tinbergen’s interest, while the substantive appraisal rests on elasticity research and the consequences of alternative trading arrangements.

Long-term development brings technological unemployment and trend movements into view. Tintner describes an investigation of mechanization, rationalization, and new combinations using American data from 1910 and 1919–1932. Its renewed relevance follows from contemporary automatization: he calls for extending the research with more recent evidence. The trend study, drawing on four countries for 1870–1914 and influenced by Keynesian ideas, establishes a different methodological lesson:

It is shown that even very simple models yield exceedingly complicated mathematical formulae for trend movements.

Simple assumptions do not guarantee simple dynamic results. Tintner reports this as a finding of the work rather than criticizing the resulting complexity. Together, these studies show how historically grounded models can address persistent economic problems while still requiring renewed empirical investigation.

The income-distribution section distinguishes policy analysis from a theoretical explanation of the distribution of earnings. In the productivity essay, linearized macroeconomic models connect policy “targets,” including social equilibrium, the balance of payments, and employment, with “instruments” such as wages, taxes, and profit margins. Tintner sharply summarizes the qualification this framework introduces:

Increase of productivity not always leads to desirable results.

Productivity growth consequently cannot be judged apart from the objectives and mechanisms of policy. The income-distribution essay explains the log-normal distribution through demand and supply for productive contributions. Although Tintner calls that paper purely theoretical, he notes its indication of possible statistical verification, preserving the review’s emphasis on the relationship between explanation and evidence.

The final substantive section gives special weight to “The theory of the optimum regime,” which Tintner considers perhaps the collection’s most interesting contribution. A welfare function summing individual utilities from consumption and effort provides the starting point. Pareto optimality supports decentralization, but possible lump-income transfers qualify its institutional implications; external effects and increasing returns introduce further complications. The argument culminates in a boundary between economic analysis and moral judgment:

It is recognized that the decision between free capitalism and collectivism is ultimately based upon ethics; but the author (whose own position is perhaps nearest to Fabian socialism) believes that, nevertheless, discussion is possible and desirable.

Tintner’s attribution of Fabian sympathies remains explicitly tentative. More firmly, he values Tinbergen’s refusal to treat ethical dependence as a reason to abandon rational discussion. The reported narrowing of differences between Eastern and Western systems, compared with recent work by Oskar Lange, situates this analysis within contemporary institutional debate. Closing with praise for the extensive bibliography and a recommendation to economists willing to engage with mathematics, Tintner presents the selection as evidence of a policy-oriented economics whose formal rigor clarifies both practical possibilities and the limits of purely economic judgment.