Nicholas Kaldor - Life

Life

He was born Káldor Miklós in Budapest, and was educated there, as well as in Berlin, and at the London School of Economics, where he subsequently became a lecturer. After service in World War II, he held a senior post with the Economic Commission for Europe. From 1964, he was an advisor to the Labour government of the UK and also advised several other countries, producing some of the earliest memoranda regarding the creation of value added tax. Inter alia, Kaldor was considered, with his fellow-Hungarian Thomas Balogh, one of the intellectual authors of the 1964–70 Harold Wilson's government's short-lived "selective employment tax (SET)" designed to tax employment in service sectors while subsidising employment in manufacturing. In 1966, he became professor of economics at the University of Cambridge. In 1974, Kaldor was made a life peer as Baron Kaldor, of Newnham in the City of Cambridge.

Married to Clarissa Goldsmith, a prominent figure in Cambridge city life, he had four daughters, including Frances Stewart, Professor of Economic Development at the University of Oxford, and Mary Kaldor, Professor of Human Security at the London School of Economics.

He died in Papworth Everard, Cambridgeshire.