3
His horizon widened when he became a Rockefeller fellow and
went to Sweden. While he stayed there two of his friends and
collegues at the Warsaw Institute were dismissed for political
reasons by order of the minister. Kalecki thereupon resigned
his position as a matter of solidarity. He never returned to
Poland until after the war.
In the course of 1936 he learned, with understandable
disappointment, that a famous English economist had just
published ideas which were very similar to his own. He then
went to England, first to the London School, then to Cambridge;
in 194o he obtained a job at the Oxford Institute of Statistics
This was a haven for economists from the continent (including
myself); most British economists were in the Civil Service then
Kalecki became the guiding spirit of this team which
consisted mainly of people with left wing (labour) sympathies.
We worked on the economic problems of the war, but also
on post-war problems. As seen from the present perspective our
attitude to reformist economic policy was positivistic: We
knew what we wanted and how it should be done.
Near the end of the war Kalecki, seing that post-war Oxford
would not offer him a Career or recognition of his work,
left for the International Labour Office in Canada, and in
1946 joined the staff of UNO as deputy director of a section
of the Economic Department. He was responsible for the World
Economic Reports. His stay at the UNO coincided with the