J ames Tobin (1918–2002) created the Tobin tax and was awarded the Nobel prize in 1981 for ‘his analysis of financial markets and their relations to expenditure decisions, employment, production and prices’. He did not consider the tax to be his most important achievement, indeed it brought him some embarrassment.
James (Jim) Tobin was born in Champaign, a university town in Illinois in the American Midwest. His mother was a social worker and his father a journalist — he was in charge of publicity for the University of Illinois athletics. His father was an intellectual and his mother told him of the human suffering of unemployment and poverty. The family held eccentric political views: when his high school staged a straw poll on the 1932 presidential election, Jim was the only student in his class to vote for Franklin D. Roosevelt.
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