Education Quote by Lawrence R. Klein

Klein’s prose has the chill precision of an annual report, and that’s the point: it performs legitimacy. By leading with “funds from the sale” flowing into “research and general teaching budgets,” he frames commercialization not as a private windfall but as an institutional reinvestment, a kind of moral laundering through the university’s core mission. The sentence turns a transaction into a civic act.

The second line pivots from stewardship to triumphal progress. Naming “Wharton Econometric Forecasting Associates, Inc.” in full corporate dress signals a boundary crossed: econometrics isn’t just an academic method now, it’s a product with an address, a payroll, and clients. The phrase “growing enterprise” carries the quiet boast of scale, while “many model and other econometric facilities” advertises breadth without revealing substance. “Facilities” is intentionally vague, suggesting infrastructure, robustness, even inevitability - a technocratic aura that reassures outsiders and flatters insiders.

Context matters: Klein helped legitimize large-scale macroeconomic modeling in the postwar era, when governments and corporations craved tools that could make the future feel governable. This passage reads like a snapshot of that moment when universities began formalizing the pipeline from publicly esteemed scholarship to privately monetizable expertise. The subtext is a defense against suspicion: forecasting for profit can be framed as forecasting for the public good, especially if the receipts underwrite classrooms and labs. Klein isn’t just describing where the money went; he’s narrating how economics learned to sell itself without sounding sold.