Author(s): | Cairncross, Alec |
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Reviewer(s): | Rollings, Neil |
Published by EH.NET (August 2000)
Alec Cairncross, Living with the Century. Fife: iynx, 1998. xvi + 320
pp. $50 (cloth), ISBN: 0-9535413-0-4.
Reviewed for EH.NET by Neil Rollings, Institute of Economic Research,
Hitotsubashi University, and Department of Economic and Social History,
University of Glasgow.
Before I start this review I should make it clear that Sir Alec Cairncross,
who died just after this book, his memoirs, had gone to press, has played an
important role in my academic career. Not only was he the Chancellor of the
University of Glasgow when I was appointed, but he was one of my referees and I
had also worked for him in preparing The Robert Hall Diaries 1947-53.
After my appointment he always found time when he visited Glasgow to see me and
to see how my work was progressing. I am sure that I am not the only young
academic who benefited from his generous support and encouragement.
There is a regular stream of memoirs and autobiographies from retired
politicians looking to set the record straight and, for the more famous, to
earn some easy money at the same time. By contrast, few economists have written
their memoirs. So one could well ask why Sir Alec Cairncross decided to write
his. The reason, I think, is that Cairncross was not a typical economist. His
main impact was not on the intellectual development of economics but through
its application, in particular through his influence on policy-making in
Britain. For many years he was at the center of government economic policy
formulation. In January 1940 and only twenty-eight years old, he entered
government service, first in the Economic Section, a small group of
professional economists at the center of government, (for eighteen months),
then briefly the Board of Trade, before spending the rest of the war working on
planning in the Ministry of Aircraft Production. From 1946 to 1949 he was
Economic Adviser to the Board of Trade and he finally returned to government
service from 1961 to 1969 as Chief Economic Adviser to the Government and then
as the first Head of the Government Economic Service. It is significant,
therefore, that the foreword to this book is written by Roy Jenkins, a
politician, and not by a fellow economist.
The chapters that cover this lengthy government service are perhaps the least
interesting to those that know Cairncross’s previous publications because he
has written widely on many of these experiences, for example in A. Cairncross
and N. Watts, The Economic Section 1939-61 (1989), Planning in
Wartime (1991), Years of Recovery: British Economic Policy 1945-51
(1985), and Managing the British Economy in the 1960s (1996). Indeed,
for the period when he was Chief Economic Adviser and the Head of the
Government Economic Service his diary has also been published.
It is elsewhere in the book that one finds more interesting material. The sheer
variety of his life and his activities is perhaps the most striking feature of
the memoirs. As a postgraduate he was in Cambridge in the 1930s and was one of
the founders of the Review of Economic Studies (later he was to help
establish the Scottish Journal of Political Economy). In 1944 he
published Introduction to Economics, which was one of the first
textbooks of modern economics and was to go through six editions, the last
being in 1982. And in the 1950s, his newly formed department at Glasgow was one
of the earliest in Britain to offer courses to business managers. In addition,
he was a member of a number of important committees in Britain, most notably
the Radcliffe Committee on the Working of the Monetary System; wrote a highly
influential report on regional growth point policy; and in 1969 became a master
of an Oxford college. Nor were his activities restricted to Britain.
Immediately after the war he was in Germany dealing with reparations, in 1950
he spent a year as Director of the Economics Division of the OEEC and for
eighteen months from 1955 was the founding Director of the Economic Development
Institute of the World Bank. Amongst his many activities in retirement were a
number of trips to China.
What is significant about this is that he was a generalist, dealing with micro
and macro issues, domestic and international affairs. He was a firm believer in
the power of human reason: economics was a way of thinking, whereby clear,
rational thought could provide the solution to a problem. Inevitably, this
meant he often had no knowledge of a particular subject prior to being asked to
consider it. It is hard to imagine that anyone now appointed to a position
equivalent to the Director of the World Bank’s Economic Development Institute
would know little about developing countries and the development literature, as
was the case with Cairncross. In the book he emphasizes how the twentieth
century has been the century of the economist and of economics, but also how
much, as a result, economics has developed over that time, not just
intellectually but also in terms of the number of practitioners and the extent
of specialization. It is highly unlikely that any young economist today would
be able in the next century to lead such a varied life and work in so many
different areas of economics. Nevertheless, we can all learn from Cairncross’s
belief that ‘to rest content with the familiar is a way of remaining
underdeveloped’ (p. 292).
Neil Rollings has just published, with Astrid Ringe, “Responding to Relative
Decline: The Creation of the National Economic Development Council,”
Economic History Review (May 2000). “Reluctant Europeans?: The
Federation of British Industries and European Integration, 1945-63,” written
with Alan McKinlay and Helen Mercer, will appear in Business History in
October 2000.
Subject(s): | History of Economic Thought; Methodology |
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Time Period(s): | 20th Century: WWII and post-WWII |