Time & Perspective Quote by James Tobin

Tobin is doing two things at once: defending economics as a hardheaded science and rescuing it from the suspicion that it’s just an elegant way to justify the status quo. The line pivots on “at the same time,” a quiet admission that economics is never purely about detached understanding. It’s also about stakes. “Improved understanding” sounds modest, even clinical, but the payoff is sweeping: “better the lot of mankind.” He’s framing the discipline as a moral technology, not merely a toolkit for markets.

The subtext sits in his biography. Growing up in the 1930s means growing up in the shadow of mass unemployment, breadlines, financial collapse, and the political extremisms that fed on economic misery. For someone who later became a leading Keynesian voice, that decade is not incidental color; it’s the origin story. The Great Depression made it difficult to believe that economic outcomes were natural, deserved, or self-correcting. If policy could worsen life so quickly, policy could also redeem it.

The phrase “the two motivations” signals Tobin’s core bet: curiosity and conscience don’t compete; they amplify each other. He’s rejecting the macho pose of value-free expertise while also rejecting pure activism unmoored from evidence. The intent is persuasion: economics earns legitimacy when it can explain the world precisely and offer workable routes to make it less brutal. In an era when technocracy is often caricatured as cold, Tobin insists the humane impulse is not a contaminant; it’s the engine.