Michal Kalecki

Born June 22, 1899, in Łódź; died Apr. 17, 1970, in Warsaw. Polish economist and statistician; member of the Polish Academy of Sciences (1957); recipient of an honorary doctorate from the University of Warsaw in 1964.

Kalecki studied at the Gdańsk Polytechnic Institute. From 1929 to 1935 he worked on problems of the national income of bourgeois Poland at the Research Institute of Market Conditions and Prices. In 1933, Kalecki created a mathematical economic model, the Kalecki mode, which describes the cyclical development of the capitalist economy. From 1936 he continued his studies and research first in Sweden and then in Great Britain. From 1940 he did research on problems of the military economy of Great Britain at the Oxford Institute of Statistics. From 1946 to 1954, Kalecki worked in the economic section of the UN Secretariat. After returning to Poland, Kalecki worked in planning agencies. From 1957 to 1960 he presided over the Main Commission for Long-term Planning. His postwar work was devoted to the problems of long-term planning of the rates of growth of the socialist economy and of national income. Kalecki was awarded the State Prize of the Polish People's Republic in 1966.