Patinkin was born January 8, 1922, in Chicago, to a family of Jewish emigrants from Poland. While doing his undergraduate studies at the University of Chicago, he also studied the Talmud at the Hebrew Theological College in Chicago. He continued at Chicago for his graduate studies, earning a Ph.D. in 1947 under the supervision of Oskar R. Lange. Patinkin was a strong Zionist and, while doing his graduate studies, already planned to emigrate to Palestine; in his graduate research he studied Palestinian economics, with a view to making his emigration case stronger, although he did not complete his thesis in this subject. After graduating he held lecturer positions at the University of Chicago and the University of Illinois until he succeeded in emigrating to Israel in 1949, where he was hired by the Hebrew University in Jerusalem. In 1956 he was appointed the research director of the Falk Institute for Economic Research, which was established by Simon Kuznetz with the support of the Falk Foundation. He remained at the Hebrew University for the rest of his career and was the university president from 1982 to 1986, following Avraham Harman, but resigned due to the poor state of the university's finances and was succeeded by Amnon Pazy. He retired in 1989, and died August 7, 1995 in Jerusalem.
Research
Patinkin's work explored some of the microfoundations of Keynesian macroeconomics, particularly the role of money demand. His monograph Money, Interest, and Prices was for many years one of the most widely used advanced references on monetary economics. Huw Dixon believes that: "Money, Interest and Prices is perhaps as great in its vision as Keynes’ General Theory. Whilst the latter has a greater abundance of originality, the former has a greater clarity of insight and formal expression. Don Patinkin states his theory of the labour market and corresponding notion of the full employment equilibrium in just three pages of Money, Interest and Prices. These pages deserve great attention: they state the labour market model that became the standard foundation for the aggregate supply curve in the aggregate demand/aggregate supply model. Although Patinkin himself did not formulate the AD/AS representation, it is implicit in his Money, Interest and Prices."
Publications
"Mercantilism and the Readmission of Jews in England", 1946, Jewish Social Studies
"Multiple-Plant Firms, Cartels and Imperfect Competition", 1947, QJE.
"Relative Prices, Say's Law, and the Demand for Money", 1948, Econometrica.
"Price Flexibility and Full Employment", 1948, AER.
"The Indeterminacy of Absolute Prices in Classical Economic Theory", 1949, Econometrica.
"Involuntary Unemployment and the Keynesian Supply Function", 1949, EJ.
