Anti-globalisation mobs running riot in Seattle, Genoa and Prague thought they had found a patron saint in James Tobin. How wrong they were. Undoubtedly, the Yale professor had conceived his now-famous Tobin tax, a small levy on foreign-currency trades, in 1971 with the aim of shielding poor countries from the whims of financial markets. Though flawed in practice, the tax's ultimate goal was clear: to help bring the benefits of free trade to the world's poor. To his great dismay, radical groups some time later tried to turn his tax against his own free-trade ideals. Unlike those anti-globalisers who romanticise poverty from afar, Mr Tobin had seen it first-hand. Coming of age in the American mid-west during the great depression, a period when rich countries shut their borders to trade, Mr Tobin said he embraced economics to "better the lot of mankind". In that spirit, while an undergraduate at Harvard in 1936, he discovered the work of John Maynard Keynes.
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