Daily Inspiration Quote by Lawrence R. Klein

It reads like a travel anecdote, but it’s really a quiet flex: the moment econometrics stopped being a boutique academic pursuit and became state infrastructure. Klein drops “Chicago” and “Ottawa” as if they’re mere waypoints, yet the geography maps a postwar power shift. Chicago signals the hard-edged, theory-forward economics factory. Ottawa signals demand: governments newly committed to managing economies, not just observing them. The “summer of 1947” timestamp matters because it lands in the thick of reconstruction politics, early Cold War anxiety, and the rapid growth of national accounting. Policy needed numbers that could act like levers.

The phrase “helping to build” is doing a lot of work. It frames model-making as collective labor, closer to engineering than armchair reasoning. That’s an intentional rebranding of the economist: not prophet, not moralist, but technician. And “the first of a series” hints at a pipeline mentality - once you build one model, you build many; once the state can forecast, it will want to. Klein’s understated tone also performs credibility. No grand claims about saving Canada, just the calm confidence of someone present at the institutional birth of macroeconomic management.

Subtextually, the line captures a bargain that still shapes public debate: policymakers get an appearance of rigor and foresight; economists get proximity to power. The cost is baked in. A model built for a government is never neutral - it selects what counts, which variables matter, which futures are legible. Klein’s sentence is modest, but it’s an origin story for the modern expectation that economies are steerable, if only you can formalize them.