Daily Inspiration Quote by Lawrence R. Klein

It reads like a bureaucratic memo, but it’s really a snapshot of a turning point: when “the economy” stopped being treatable as a self-contained national machine and started looking like a system with exposed wiring running across borders. Klein’s intent is practical and programmatic. The SSRC committee isn’t chasing an abstract idea; it’s redirecting scarce research horsepower from a flagship national model to a global one because the real puzzle has moved. If shocks don’t stay put, then a U.S.-only model becomes an elegant instrument for the wrong song.

The subtext is methodological ambition disguised as administrative tidiness. “Team research” signals the mid-century rise of organized, grant-funded, computational macroeconomics, where models are built like infrastructure: collaboratively, iteratively, with an implied faith that better measurement plus better equations can tame messy reality. Switching from “a model of the United States” to “one for world trade” also implies a quiet critique of the parochialism embedded in earlier macro work. You can’t explain domestic employment, inflation, or growth if trade flows, capital movements, and policy shifts abroad are treated as background noise.

Context matters: postwar reconstruction, expanding trade, the Bretton Woods era’s managed international system, and recurring balance-of-payments anxieties. “International transmission mechanism” is the key phrase - a technocratic way of naming how crises, booms, and policy decisions propagate like contagion. Klein is marking the moment economists began to formalize globalization before the term became common, converting geopolitical interdependence into something you could estimate, simulate, and, crucially, argue about with numbers.