Some Distinguished Economists

I remember a time when the Econocracy had not yet emerged. Economics was beginning to flounder, as the NeoKeynesian orthodoxy that had been established in the nineteen fifties  began to reveal its fallibility in the emergence of excess inflation in the 'sixties; which was to lead to the chaos of the 'seventies and the rise of Monetarism that paved the way for the free marketeers who were the founders of the Econocratic hegemony that currently prevails.

For any reader who might happen upon this blog, and wonder what planet I am writing from, I explain that the term Econocracy has been created by the Post Crash Economics Society, a Manchester-based student movement that has successfully challenged the prevailing orthodoxy in formal Economics that has given us the 2007-9 crash, declining living standards, decayed industry, an intractable balance of payments deficit, austerity and [in a public backlash] the Brexit calamity. The Econocrats are the professors and established lecturers, senior lecturers, readers who demand of their students credulous adherence to the dogmas that have led to the ills in society and the economy that have just been listed. The Manchester group have produced the book - Econocracy -in which they explain the term in its context. They have also published research that shows how closely most university courses follow the 'official' line.

I was fortunate to pass through a university system that was vastly smaller than it is today: fewer than forty fully-fledged UK universities, and many of them had only one professor of Economics and up to six other teachers. I find it astonishing now to look back into old university Calendars and find that whole degrees were delivered by teams as small as four academics. The Great Man of the 'Economics profession' was Sir John Hicks [the first British recipient of the pseudo-Nobel prize], but the dominant individuals who decided who got appointed to which vacant chair in Economics were Lionel Robbins [Lord Robbins of Clare Market] the unchallenged boss-man of the LSE and Charles Carter, founder VC of Lancaster University and editor-in-chief of the highly influential Economic Journal.

Typically, syllabuses contained an element of Economic History [which would greatly benefit the students of today] and also a paper on the History of Economic Thought. Mathematical aspects were not prominent, and could often be avoided: in my own university it was even possible to evade the simple Statistics course by opting for Ethics. By 1945 all universities [so far as I know] had supplanted JS Mill as the basic source text by Alfred Marshall's Economics,  and they all taught about Neo-Keynesian macroeconomics. Paul A Samuelson and JK Galbraith were the best sellers among a raft of fat textbooks that combined those two syllabus areas; and when I joined the University of Sheffield as a research fellow there was a well-established game by which students tracked Prof JC Gilbert's lectures through the textbooks.

One great characteristic of the small number of leading professors of the subject was their difference in emphasis and research orientation. Bob Black at Belfast, Terence Hutcheson at Birmingham, and Ron Meek in Leicester provided a choice of interpretations that is painfully lacking today. Mark Blaug, though he went through much of his career in the shadow of Lord Robbins, was a good independent scholar. It is very sad for the subject and for the country that such a range of talent is not available today.