AUSTIN ROBINSON Also by Sir Alec Cairncross A COUNTRY TO PLAY WITH ECONOMICS AND ECONOMIC POLICY GOODBYE GREAT BRITAIN (with K. Burk) PLANNING IN WARTIME: Aircraft Production in Britain, Germany and the USA STERLING IN DECLINE (with B. Eichengreen) THE BRITISH ECONOMY SINCE THE WAR THE ECONOMIC SECTION 1939-61: A Study in Economic Advising (with N. Watts) THE PRICE OF WAR THE ROBERT HALL DIARIES, Volume 1: 1947-53 and Volume 2: 1954-61 (editor) YEARS OF RECOVERY Austin Robinson The Life of an Economic Adviser Alec Cairncross 150th YEAR M Palgrave Macmillan © Sir Alec Caimcross 1993 Softcover reprint of the hardcover 1st edition 1993 All rights reserved. No reproduction, copy or transmission of this publication may be made without written permission. No paragraph of this publication may be reproduced, copied or transmitted save with written permission or in accordance with the provisions of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988, or under the terms of any licence permitting limited copying issued by the Copyright Licensing Agency, 90 Tottenham Court Road, London WIP 9HE. Any person who does any unauthorised act in relation to this publication may be liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damages. First published in Great Britain 1993 by THE MACMILLAN PRESS LTD Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire RG21 2XS and London Companies and representatives throughout the world A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. ISBN 978-1-349-22897-3 ISBN 978-1-349-22895-9 (eBook) DOI 10.1007/978-1-349-22895-9 First published in the United States of America 1993 by Scholarly and Reference Division, ST. MARTIN'S PRESS, INC., 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, N.Y. 10010 ISBN 978-0-312-09471-3 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Caimcross, Alec, Sir, 1911- Austin Robinson: the life of an economic adviser I Alec Caimcross. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-0-312-09471-3 1. Robinson, E. A. G. (Edward Austin Gossage). 2. Economists -Great Britain-Biography. 3. Great Britain-Economic policy-1918-1945. 4. Great Britain-Economic policy-l945- I. Title. HBI03.R628C35 1993 338.941'0092-dc20 [Bl 92-36201 CIP Contents Preface vii Introduction 1 1 Early Days 4 2 Tutoring a Maharajah 19 3 The 1930s: Early Publications 37 4 African Survey 51 5 Wartime and After: 1939-45 78 6 The Postwar Years: 1945--8 97 7 Cambridge and Elsewhere: 1948--92 110 8 Austin the Economist 144 9 Austin the Man 165 Notes 175 E. A. C. Robinson: A Bibliography 183 Index 191 Publishers' Note Sadly Sir Austin Robinson did not live to see the publication of this book. He died on 1 June 1993, atthe age of 95, after the proofs had been passed for press. Preface Sir Austin Robinson has had a unique career, beginning in the nine teenth century and stretching out towards the twenty-first. His long life includes a spell as a seaplane pilot in the First World War when seaplanes were barely ten years old; tutoring a maharajah for two years in India; travelling for 12,000 miles through Africa in 1932; taking part in the various revolutions in economic thought in Cam bridge in the 1930s; playing a leading part on the economic side of the war effort from 1939 to 1945; and exercising a major influence after the war in nearly every major association of economists in this country. I started to write his life with all this in mind but also from a sense of personal obligation. It was he who brought about what proved to be the most important event in my professional career at the end of 1939. He rang me up when I was just about to go to the Scottish Home Department in Edinburgh to organise information-gathering on the state of public morale by pub-crawl, and suggested, out of the blue, that I should join him and John Jewkes in the War Cabinet Offices as some kind of economic adviser. This brought me in at the birth of what, a year later, became the Economic Section of the War Cabinet Offices and was transferred in 1953 to the Treasury as the chief source of economic advice to the Chancellor of the Exchequer. Then at the end of the war I took over from Austin in Berlin as head of the Economic Advisory Panel, acting for the Treasury in the quadripartite negotiations on the future level of industry in Ger many. On my return to London in the spring of 1946 I was asked once again to follow him, this me ~s Economic Adviser to the Board of Trade. When I came to prepare a draft of the memoir, I found that much more detail survived to enliven the narrative, both in letters from India and Africa and in wartime papers, than I could have guessed. Added to that, Austin has been indefatigable in amplifying my draft with his own memories, written in his usual elegant style. I must have had at least a letter a week from him, sometimes even two a day, many of them filling several pages and all containing material that I could build into the text like a bird's nest. Although I take full viii Preface responsibility for the manuscript, a high proportion of it is written in Austin's own words or condenses information he has supplied. Among those to whom I am indebted for information in prepar ing this memoir are Joyce Baird, Ezra Bennathan, Henry Phelps Brown, Tam Dalyell, Charles Feinstein, Geoffrey Harcourt, Barbara Jeffrey, David Layton, Robin Matthews, James Meade, Margaret Robinson, Aubrey Silberston, Hans Singer and John Toye. I am indebted to Cambridge University Press for permission to reprint in Chapter 1 an extract from Eminent Economists: Their Life Philosophies. I should like also to thank Mrs Anne Robinson for once more reduc ing my scribbles to order and legibility. ALEC CAIRNCROSS Introduction Sir Austin Robinson is the last of the Cambridge economists of prewar days and by no means the least in the part he has played in the development of the subject. He was a close associate of Keynes, helping him with the editing of the Economic Journal before becom ing joint editor with Roy Harrod in 1944, a post he held for 26 years. He took a prominent part in the affairs of the University from the planning of the old Marshall Library to the establishment of the Department of Applied Economics and the development of the site on Sidgwick A venue: it is not without cause that his name is at tached to the Austin Robinson building on that site. He had a hand in the postwar period in the creation and operation of several key institutions, helping to launch the International Economic Associ ation as its Treasurer (and, in effect, Secretary-General) from 1950 to 1959; taking part in the setting up of the Overseas Development Institute and serving since its foundation on its Executive Commit tee; acting as chairman of the National Institute for Economic and Social Research from 1949 to 1962. His official career was equally distinguished. With John Jewkes and Harry Campion he was one of the founders of what developed into the Economic Section and its twin, the Central Statistical Office. He was the archetypal economic adviser: to the Ministry of Produc tion in 1942-5; on reparations policy in 1945; to the Board of Trade in 1946; to the Treasury as a member of its planning staff in 1947-8; and long afterwards, in all but name, to the Ministry of Power in 1967-8. As we shall see, this is far from a comprehensive list: how could it be for someone who was a test pilot in 1918 and a Fellow of a Cambridge college five years later, yet was still able to draft a report on energy and economic development for Taiwan in 1982 and publish lengthy articles in the 1990s. Although prominent as an economist, Austin Robinson would not claim to be a leading theorist. In the 1930s, it is true, he was a recognised contributor to economic theory, the author of two of the Cambridge Economic Handbooks, then the staple reading of univer sity students of economics. In their impact on the profession these works did not compare with that of his wife's Economics of Imperfect Competition. It may be, none the less, that he was closer to modem 1