Axel Leijonhufvud was born September 6, 1933 in Brömma, a suburb of Stockholm, Sweden. He was the youngest of five children of Erik Gabriel Leijonhufvud and Hélène Neovius.
Hässleholm
When Axel was three, his father accepted an appointment as Chief Judge (Häradshövding) of the Northern District of the large Southern province of Skåne. The court’s seat was in the small town of Hässleholm.
When I had my first lunch date with Axel in the late 1970’s, he asked a little about my personal background. “Oh, I said, I’m a native Californian from a small city in the center of the state, Fresno”. He said: “How big was your city?”. I said: “Oh, when I was growing up, officially 66,000 but including the unincorporated suburbs probably more like 88,000. Today, it is probably about 250,000.” Well, he said, the town where I grew up had about 1300 people and today may have about 4000 or 5,000. I said: Oh, but you grew up in Europe where you have historic churches and castles.” He said: “When was your city founded?”. I said: “About 1892.” He said: “Mine was founded in 1914 at the juncture of the major railroads crossing Sweden!”
When he was a boy, Axel did not particularly notice the smallness of his town. His three older sisters were soon out of the house either studying at the university or married. Axel’s brother, Erik, being seven years older than Axel, continued to occupy smaller but somewhat separate quarters on the floor above. However, Axel had the company of a foster brother, Rurik Peura, with whom he shared his room.
During the brief period of the Nazi-Soviet Pact, Stalin used the opportunity in 1939 to try to retake the former Imperial Grand Duchy of Finland which since the end of World War I had been recognized as an independent republic. Axel’s mother, though not of Finnish ethnicity, was born in Helsinki and Axel’s father also felt close ties, and even joined the Swedish volunteer forces in Finland as an army officer during the brief Winter War.
In a manner similar to the U.S. “orphan trains” that brought children from the crowded urban centers of the East to the Midwest between 1859 and 1929, trains carried refugee Finnish children over the northern border into Sweden where local families at each railroad stop chose the children they could bring into their home for the duration of the crisis. Axel’s mother was head of the local Lotta League, a Finnish relief organization founded during World War I, and Axel’s family received into their home a Finnish boy one year younger than Axel. Despite an initial language barrier Rurik and Axel quickly became best friends and shared many boyish adventures together. In 1945, when Axel was twelve, Rurik, who by then had forgotten his Finnish, returned to Helsinki.
Axel valued his time alone with his parents. Yet, as a teen he began to feel the provincial nature of his town. I suppose he “moped about”. Axel had always been a big reader. Now, he was drawn to history and stories of the sea. I know he read Joseph Conrad and William Henry Dana, Two Years Before the Mast. Later in life he was an enthusiast of the “Flashman” series of historical novels, and more recently of Patrick O’Brian’s series on the British navy during the Napoleonic Wars of which “Master and Commander” is best known.
While still a student in the classical liceo (Gymnasium) Axel learned of an opportunity to go to sea. Remarkably, his parents allowed him to take leave from school for a nine-month voyage on a three-mast sail ship, a school ship operated by the Abraham Rydberg Foundation, called “Sunbeam”. He was seventeen.
The Escape from Hässleholm: The “Sunbeam”
Axel’s time on the “Sunbeam” was an important turning point in Axel’s life and he related stories from his time on that sailing ship often. The school ship left Göteborg, made a stop in the English port of Southampton where it was fully outfitted, sailed partly down the coast of Africa, making a stop at the then still impoverished Canary Islands (and Azores on the return), were becalmed in the Atlantic for some days as they tried to make the difficult but historic crossing, and finally arrived at Recife, Brazil. His most terrifying stories were from the Caribbean – and mostly related to the widespread availability of very cheap white rum.
The ship had a few experienced hands in addition to the young sailors. Axel was somewhat myopic so he was assigned to work in the auxiliary engine room which helped bring the ship into port. The cook--we won’t say chef! -- who may have had alcoholic tendencies indulged himself with cheap rum and when he returned to the ship anchored in harbor he was suffering from the DT’s (delirium tremens). He had also developed a determination to get rid of a young sailor with an aristocratic name. Axel was down below in the engine room and the ship had only a skeleton crew on board. The cook came part-way down the single stairway and between terrors in which he howled like a wolf, he threatened to get “Leijonhufvud” as he brandished a big knife. The cook had the only exit blocked and it was unlikely anyone would have heard cries for “help”. Fortunately, Axel had time to think. He had the wrench he had been using in one hand but he developed another idea as well. When the cook recovered enough to descend the stairway determined to carry out his threat, the long-legged, teenager leaped across the big hole where the engine was secured, and the cook in trying to follow fell about 8 feet below allowing Axel to dash up the stairs for help. The cook ended up being left on the island in hospital with a broken leg under police authority. At another island, the steward who was to have bought the stores to resupply the ship, gambled away the money, and disappeared, though he was later caught and arrested. The young crew returned home with neither cook nor steward, a lot of spoiled meat, and little to eat other than Swedish rye crackers (“knäckebröd”) which were filled with tiny little insects (weevils) that the young sailors tried to eliminate by tapping the crackers on the table. [Eventually, they invented competitive games counting the most insects to exit with a single smack on the table!]
Axel returned home, and re-enrolled in the Gymnasium as promised. However, for two successive summers he left school early to work on merchant marine ships that plied the waters of the West Coast of South, Central, and North America. [ Axel would later say that his experiences gave him a first-hand understanding how unions come to form especially around safety issues.]
These adventures gave Axel a new standing in his school. He was often scolded by his Swedish-born English teachers for his casual fluency in American English. The fact some of the pretty girls noticed him seemed to have been welcome compensation!
Axel had a lively sense of humor and it was evident in his writings. The “corridor theory” is associated with his name—the idea that within certain parameters the economy is self-correcting but outside the corridor--for example, in great depressions or high inflations—this is not so. The image Axel used was of a sailor in a storm, or a drunken sailor, trying to walk the narrow corridor of a ship while being thrown wall-to-wall and, yet, safe within the corridor.
Axel often used images from his own experience or little jokes to lighten the boredom of writing--as much for himself as for his readers, he said!
Having completed the Gymnasium, Axel was faced with career choices. Sweden had compulsory military service. Axel opted for the longer course of training. He had thought of going to Naval Officer’s School but learned that those who had served in the merchant marine were not welcome. So, he did Army Officer’s School instead. In the end, [after 21 months] the young lieutenant decided not to pursue a military career.
University of Lund: Axel’s Choice of Economics
In the 1950’s the United Nations and its auxiliary organizations were very important not just to the West but to many other less economically developed countries. The Scandinavians, especially Swedes, played an important diplomatic role in the post-World War II world. Dag Hammarskjöld, whose older brother had been a classmate of Axel’s father in Uppsala, was one of the legendary Secretary Generals of the U.N. in its heyday. It is not surprising that Axel, with his love of history and desire to see the world, thought a diplomatic career might be suitable. He learned that political economy was an important prerequisite for following in the footsteps of Hammarskjöld who was himself an economist. And so, he began his undergraduate studies in Economics at the University of Lund.
Axel talked little about his studies at Lund. He was more likely to talk about the chess tournaments in which he participated. Though he was not working to full capacity, he did well enough. As he often said, he made sure NOT to foreclose opportunities. His principal tutor was Johan Henrik Åkerman (1896-1982). [Åkerman would have taught a pre-General Theory version of business cycle theory, his approach in many respects reflecting that used by Warren Persons and the NBER-National Bureau of Economic Research.] I do not recall Axel ever commenting directly on what he was taught. He DID often describe the seminars with Åkerman. Åkerman had become nearly totally deaf. Students could only communicate with him by submitting their questions in writing. The lessons must have seemed painfully slow to a young man.
Axel went up to the University of Stockholm for a term, mostly, he claimed to follow a girlfriend who later became his wife. Here, he came into contact with the Stockholm School. Gunnar Myrdal, whom he came to know much later, was on leave but he had Erik Lundberg as a professor. [He may also have encountered the work of the economic historian, Erik Dahmén, at this time.]*
Axel’s thought was to go on for a master’s degree (“polities magister”) in preparation for a position at the I.M.F. or World Bank. However, upon receiving his basic undergraduate degree (fil.cand.) from Lund, he applied and won a fellowship from the Scandinavian American Foundation which placed him at the University of Pittsburgh.
University of Pittsburgh
Axel always considered his year at Pittsburgh the major turning point in his life. Pittsburgh was a second-tier graduate school in economics at that time but Axel “caught fire” and delved deeply into theory. [He would have read Keynes, Alvin Hansen’s Guide to Keynes, and the most prominent Keynesians.]
He has always given special credit to James G. Witte, a young professor just a few years older than Axel. A Midwesterner, Witte befriended Axel and took him to baseball games where Axel saw the Pittsburgh Pirates defeat the New York Yankees in the World Series. [Axel often referred to his memories of the physical grace of the great Pirates’ outfielder, Roberto Clemente] They, doubtless, talked economics during this slow-developing American game.
Axel could never get over the generosity of his professors at Pittsburgh who not only encouraged him to go beyond the masters but to apply to a top tier school. They thought his best chance was to be interviewed in person. When Axel explained he was a husband and father to a small son and that he could not afford to go on without support, Witte and his professors at the Pitt social science center found money within their own budget to finance Axel’s trips to Princeton, Yale, Brown, Harvard, and MIT! Axel NEVER forgot this.
Northwestern
Axel’s choices narrowed down to Harvard and MIT. Both institutions offered Axel full fellowships for his Ph.D. but not in “theory” since they were already insisting on a higher level of formal mathematics training than Axel had. The MIT department chairman relaxed when Axel rejected the offer: “If I were you, I would choose an institution which is not quite yet at the top but rapidly moving upward. That is an exciting place to be.” Axel said: Could you give me an example? He replied: “Northwestern. Franco Modigliani is leaving MIT for Northwestern.” Axel, who was an admirer of Modigliani’s work, [ Witte had introduced him to Modigliani’s work] took in this information. As Axel walked down the corridor toward the exit, he saw Modigliani’s name on an office door, and the door slightly ajar. Axel knocked and was invited in. After a conversation, Modigliani said: “I can offer you a full fellowship to Northwestern if you will choose to follow me there.” And, that is what happened.
However, Modigliani left after one year, and Robert W. Clower who was on the Northwestern faculty was, in fact, not there at all—but in Liberia doing a major study for the World Bank. Even when Clower returned in Axel’s last year at Northwestern, Clower was dividing his time between England, where his family lived, and Northwestern. Axel’s thesis advisor was Robert Strotz, (an econometrician who wrote his University of Chicago thesis with Tjalling Koopmans). The other signatories were Meyer Burstein and Robert W. Clower who came on the committee at the end. Axel’s studies in monetary and macroeconomic theory at Northwestern were primarily with Meyer Burstein with whom he developed a personal relationship.**
Having passed his doctoral examinations, Axel accepted a year [1963-1964] at Brookings, a famed liberal think-tank in Washington DC where he continued work on a dissertation that would draw a distinction between Keynes and the Keynesians.*** A year later, given a choice between Yale and UCLA, Axel surprisingly chose UCLA.
UCLA
Axel had been told by young assistant professors at Yale that one would only meet the senior professors at the “annual review of the troops”. At UCLA, instead, “workshops” were regularly attended by most members of the faculty and there was a great deal of interaction with senior colleagues—in particular, the department chair, Armen Alchian. Armen quietly and effectively took a number of steps to retain Axel.**** [And, Axel never forgot. Armen lived to 98 and in his last four years, when Axel heard that Armen was beginning to show mental signs of advanced age, he went out of his way to visit Armen in his home and converse with him about former times.]
The outline of Axel’s long career at UCLA is well-known.
Axel’s close relationship with Bob Clower began in the period he was writing the dissertation and would continue when Clower joined the UCLA faculty in 1971. As Axel tried to complete his doctoral thesis while teaching a full array of undergraduate and graduate classes, he entered into a lively correspondence with Meyer Burstein and Robert Clower.
In a letter to Axel written at 5AM, November 4, 1966, Clower wrote from Essex England that he had been reading Axel’s thesis through the night and that it was already a book. He said he was rushing to advise Axel before others got hold of the manuscript to choose a prestige press such as Harvard or Oxford [rather than U.C.]. John Hicks and Milton Friedman who had been asked by Alchian to give a formal evaluation of Axel’s work wrote strong supportive statements as well. The book was published by Oxford [ 1968 On Keynesian Economics and the Economics of Keynes]. It established Axel’s reputation and shot him up to full professor in record time. It has been translated into a number of languages.
Despite different personalities, Clower and Leijonhufvud had an enduring personal relationship. In the early years they collaborated on some major articles. Clower always remained a “proud” mentor. [I felt he treated Axel almost like a son.] When Clower became editor of Economic Inquiry in 1973, he asked Axel to complete the manuscript Axel had been privately circulating that was a spoof on the economics profession of the 1960’s and the rival “tribes” across the Charles River in Boston (i.e., Harvard and MIT). It obviously was influenced by Axel’s readings in cultural anthropology (especially, Claude Levi-Strauss). “Life Among the Econ” became Axel’s most translated work, and, has been cited seriously by anthropologists--recently by Gillian Tett in the Financial Times.
Although he was a theorist, Axel never lost his conviction that economics was ultimately not about the beauty of the model but about the real world. He was involved in one monetary stabilization effort in Argentina, [co-authored book with Daniel Heymann on High Inflations] and, leaped at the chance to help republics within the USSR during the period of transition—mostly without compensation. Twice at Trento he tried to get a fruitful “conversation” between Central Bankers and economic theorists—but felt he had not quite managed to achieve his goal. He wrote extensively about the “Great Recession” on the web publications CEPR and VoxEU. [At UCLA, by choice, he often taught an upper division course in European Economic Institutions posing theoretical questions about, for example, differences in the rise and fall of serfdom in Western and Eastern Europe.]
During a budgetary crisis in the early 1990’s, when the UC university system offered enhanced retirement pensions to senior faculty who met certain criteria, Axel took the offer (1994). The invitation from the University of Trento came “out of the blue” a few months later in 1995. Axel had lectured at Trento just one time. He had been a visitor at the European University in Fiesole several times, and had directed with Ned Phelps a successful two week “summer school” at the Certosa di Pontignano (Siena) for several years in the 1980’s. Nonetheless, after some reflection, Axel said “yes. And, he never regretted it.
Trento
At Trento, Axel worked most closely with the macroeconomic group—especially his Chairman, Massimo Egidi, and his colleague, Elisabetta De Antoni. He was grateful for the support all the chairmen and the university gave him and, when he could, used his influence to support departmental initiatives. He was pleased to be teaching a young corps of students once again.
Axel discovered that he liked Trentino and Alto Adige, its mountains and valleys. With no pretense to being a mountaineer, he liked to hike mountain trails at high altitudes and would do so into his 80’s. Of course, he delighted in finding good places to eat. He liked little historical “finds” off the beaten tourist path whether it was tiny chapels dating to the first Christianization of the region or sad monuments to the courage of the “alpinisti” during the First World War. Upon hearing that in a remote valley, (Romedio in the Val di Non?) residents still ate a little speciality called “bucklín” which he realized was the lightly smoked, salt Baltic herring called “böckling” he wondered about the historic trade route that would have led to this remote place! He loved living in a large attic apartment in an historical building (Trautmannsdorf) and liked to walk to work in an historic inner city, saving his auto excursions for the weekends.
Trento Summer School in Adaptive Economic Dynamics
In “Toward a Not Too Rational Economics”, 1993 [Southern Economic Journal] Axel returned to the theme of microfoundations about which he had written earlier with Bob Clower. He credited Dr. Kumaraswamy Velupillai with teaching him about the possibilities of “computable economics. He had known Dr. Spiro Latsis for many years but had never asked him for support. Now, he went to Dr. Latsis with a proposal that he thought would interest him. It did. Dr. Spiro helped start a center for computable economics at UCLA and when Axel came to Trento the Latsis Foundation agreed to move its support.
In the two weeks of the summer school Axel hoped to create a congenial atmosphere in which the distinguished lecturers would act as “teachers” in both formal and informal settings to the post-graduate students. His models were: Nafplion, a conference organized by the young Spiro with his father’s financial help in the early 1970’s and the summer schools at the Certosa di Pontignano-Siena in the 1980’s.
Axel encouraged new developments in computable, agent-based, and adaptive economics. With additional assistance from CEEL, the department, university, and, later, INET, the Trento Summer School in Adaptive Economic Dynamics endured for nearly twenty years. Enrico Zaninotto, as Director in Trento over its last decade, capably organized the summer schools both in an administrative and scientific sense.
As a final comment, I’d like to say this. In speaking about trends in economic theory, Axel was always clear and direct. But he always thought in terms of a battle of ideas rather than of personalities. Even in trying circumstances, he had a remarkable ability not to “carry on” but to move on. And, he was much the same at home. He was a lovely man.
Thank you, Trento, for remembering and honoring him.
Additional Notes
These notes (September 28, 2022) add some detail to this brief memory of Axel’s life and academic career. These notes amplify the brief text as delivered above or try to address some of the questions I have received with regard to his early biography.
Knut Wicksell (1851-1926) who was professor of economics at the University of Lund, was the grand figure and great presence in the story of Swedish economic thought. Åkerman had written his thesis under him but more importantly the work of the Swedish School economists who wrote in their native language in the 1930’s built their macroeconomic fluctuation models incorporating the element of time on a Wicksellian foundation. Axel showed his awareness of the Swedish School but side-stepped a discussion in his 1968 book On Keynesian Economics and the Economics of Keynes, p. 343. Since this is a personal memoire I remember the Arne Ryde Symposium on Wicksell in September 1977 in Frostavallen Sweden. Axel picked up a copy of an English translation of Torsten Gårdlund’s Life of Knut Wicksell at that time and read it with great interest, commenting on it often. In his library is also a 1990 reissue of Gårdlund’s book in Swedish in which his former student, Lars Jonung, was involved. Axel, of course, would return to Wicksell and publish articles on the Wicksell “connection” in later years.
* As an impoverished UCLA assistant professor, Axel would translate Dahmén’s work on the development of Swedish manufacturing between 1919-1939. He often described the terrible difficulties in understanding and translating appropriately the technicalities of the shoe industry. With the help of a UCLA research librarian who eventually found an old book somewhere in the U.S. library or Library of Congress system, he finally got drawings that helped resolve the problem!
** I know he also had a class in history of economic thought from Frank Fetter, son of Frank Albert Fetter who brought the approach of the Austrian School to the U.S. Upon meeting Fetter many years ago, Axel commented that though the younger Fetter was not a memorable lecturer, he covered a lot of material in his class which Axel later appreciated since he had been made to read extensively in economic thought.
***1963 was a momentous year in Washington, D.C. With a very young Gabriella on his shoulders, Axel joined at the edge of the crowd surrounding the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool to hear Martin Luther King, Jr. deliver his “I Have a Dream” speech during the March on Washington, August 28, 1963. He also stood in the long lines in near freezing temperatures in late November that same year to pay his respects to the assassinated young American President, John F. Kennedy.
****In addition to engaging Axel in serious discussion on his work both in the UCLA workshops and at lunch or coffee, Armen gave critical assistance to Axel in two concrete ways. First, Armen found a way to prevent the deportation of Axel’s eldest child. Axel’s son, Carl, was born in Sweden. His illness as an infant in a day when x-ray was the only investigative imaging available was correctly diagnosed late. Carl survived the crisis and was restored to health once a damaged kidney was removed. Unbeknownst to the family, when they arrived in the U.S. with a healthy, physically active child, Carl had suffered diffuse brain damage from which he would suffer for the rest of his life. When Axel sought to transfer his temporary visa to a permanent (green card) visa in order to obtain employment at UCLA, he was required to have an interview with an immigration officer with both his wife and son who also were Swedish citizens attending. Upon seeing the hyperactive child who was not yet speaking the officer made clear that though Axel and Märta could be issued a green card, their son could not and would have to be deported. An impossible situation. Armen, who was an avid golfer and played on one of the premier courses in West Los Angeles, was paired one day with an aide to the new Senator, George Murphy, a song-and-dance man from the movies who following in Ronald Reagan’s footsteps had entered politics. Armen raised to Murphy’s chief aide the problem he had encountered in retaining a young assistant professor at UCLA. The aide said that the late 19th century law which excluded the “feeble-minded” was being changed in the new 1965 immigration reform legislation and that the Senator could ask that the local immigration officer set aside the file until the new law was implemented. Axel remembers the family being brought to meet the Senator for a photo opportunity on the day that Carl as well as Axel and Märta were made U.S. permanent residents. (Axel remained a Swedish citizen even when dual citizenship became available.) Second, Armen helped retain Axel on the faculty in another way. It was the practice of major U.S. universities of making a determination “up-or-out” on their assistant professors after a set number of years, that is, either tenure or non-renewal. With the long delay in completing his Ph.D. thesis, Axel was in danger of missing that administrative deadline. With Axel’s consent, Armen took Axel off the ladder for a year, making him a visiting “lecturer”. Upon completion of Axel’s still unpublished Ph.D. manuscript Armen requested letters of support not only from Robert W. Clower and his Ph.D. committee members but from Milton Friedman and John Hicks neither of whom, I believe, had yet made Axel’s personal acquaintance. Armen was asked to become Christina’s godfather when she was born in Los Angeles.