Hope Powered James Tobin Focus On Goals: Economist's desire to better man's lot earned him a Nobel Prize.(LEADERS & SUCCESS)

Byline: PATRICK SEITZ

As a teen-ager during the Great Depression, James Tobin saw human suffering. All around him, people were out of work and unsure how they were going to survive. He heard horrible stories from his mother, a social worker, about the abysmal situations others faced.

Tobin was frustrated. But he funneled that frustration into a commitment to make the world a better place. He vowed then to focus his career on that goal.

That focus served him well. For more than 60 years, Tobin dedicated himself to his teachings, scholarly works and public service as an economist. He's considered one of the seminal theorists in the field. In 1981, his work won him a Nobel Prize in economics.

Tobin developed a zeal for economics after winning an academic scholarship to Harvard in 1935. He read a then-new book by British economist John Maynard Keynes and "was hooked," he wrote in his Nobel Museum autobiography. The Keynes book, titled "The General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money," advocated government intervention in the economy. It was a major influence on Tobin's work.

He liked economics for two reasons. For one, he wrote, it was "intellectually fascinating and challenging," but also "it offered the hope, as it still does, that improved understanding could better the lot of mankind."

Tobin was a voracious reader, says John Geanakoplos, an economics professor at Yale, where Tobin taught from 1950 to 1988. His love of reading started at a young age. Growing up in Champaign, Ill., his house was full of books and magazines, he told a colleague. He was greatly influenced by his intellectual father, a journalist.