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Sir Arthur Lewis: A Biography PDF

352 Pages·2013·3.24 MB·English
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Great Thinkers in Economics Series Series Editor: A.P. Thirlwall is Professor of Applied Economics, University of Kent, UK. Great Thinkers in Economics is designed to illuminate the economics of some of the great historical and contemporary economists by exploring the interactions between their lives and work, and the events surrounding them. The books are brief and written in a style that makes them not only of interest to professional economists, but also intelligible for students of economics and the interested lay person. Titles include: Esben Sloth Anderson JOSEPH A. SCHUMPETER James Ronald Stanfield and Jacqueline Bloom Stanfield JOHN KENNETH GALBRAITH Julio Lopez and Michaël Assous MICHAL KALECKI G.C. Harcourt and Prue Kerr JOAN ROBINSON Alessandro Roncaglia PIERO SRAFFA William J. Barber GUNNAR MYRDAL Paul Davidson JOHN MAYNARD KEYNES Peter D. Groenewegen ALFRED MARSHALL Michael Szenberg and Lall Ramrattan FRANCO MODIGLIANI Gavin Kennedy ADAM SMITH John E. King NICHOLAS KALDOR Gordon Fletcher DENNIS ROBERTSON John E. King DAVID RICARDO Barbara Ingham and Paul Mosley SIR ARTHUR LEWIS Forthcoming titles include: Nahid Aslanbeigui and Guy Oakes ARTHUR C.PIGOU Warren Young and Esteban Perez ROY HARROD Robert Dimand JAMES TOBIN Albert Jolink JAN TINBERGEN Great Thinkers in Economics Series Standing Order ISBN 978–14039–8555-2 (Hardback) 978–14039–8556–9 (Paperback) (outside North America only) You can receive future titles in this series as they are published by placing a standing order. Please contact your bookseller or, in case of difficulty, write to us at the address below with your name and address, the title of the series and one of the ISBNs quoted above. Customer Services Department, Macmillan Distribution Ltd, Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire RG21 6XS, England Sir Arthur Lewis A Biography Barbara Ingham Honorary Research Associate, School of African and Oriental Studies, University of London, UK and Paul Mosley Professor of Economics, University of Sheffield, UK © Barbara Ingham and Paul Mosley 2013 All rights reserved. No reproduction, copy or transmission of this publication may be made without written permission. No portion 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, Saffron House, 6–10 Kirby Street, London EC1N 8TS. Any person who does any unauthorized act in relation to this publication may be liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damages. The authors have asserted their rights to be identified as the authors of this work in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. First published 2013 by PALGRAVE MACMILLAN Palgrave Macmillan in the UK is an imprint of Macmillan Publishers Limited, registered in England, company number 785998, of Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire RG21 6XS. Palgrave Macmillan in the US is a division of St Martin’s Press LLC, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10010. Palgrave Macmillan is the global academic imprint of the above companies and has companies and representatives throughout the world. Palgrave® and Macmillan® are registered trademarks in the United States, the United Kingdom, Europe and other countries. ISBN 978-1-349-36339-1 ISBN 978-1-137-36643-6 (eBook) DOI 10.1057/9781137366436 This book is printed on paper suitable for recycling and made from fully managed and sustained forest sources. Logging, pulping and manufacturing processes are expected to conform to the environmental regulations of the country of origin. A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. A catalog record for this book is available from the Library of Congress. Contents List of Illustrative Material vii Preface and Acknowledgements viii 1 The Caribbean in Turmoil: Prologue to a Biography 1 1.1 Lewis’s trajectory 1 1.2 Early life in the Caribbean, 1915–33 2 1.3 The approach of this book 12 2 ‘Marvellous intellectual feasts’: The LSE Years, 1933–48 17 2.1 Introduction 17 2.2 The London School of Economics, 1933–45 19 2.3 From undergraduate student to assistant lecturer 24 2.4 Publications 31 2.5 Communicating with the public 36 2.6 The final years: the LSE post-war 39 3 The Colonial Office and the Genesis of Development Economics 43 3.1 Lewis’s hinterland: ‘anti-imperialists’ and the Fabian Colonial Bureau 43 3.2 The Colonial Economic Advisory Committee, 1943–4 53 3.3 Lewis and development policy after the war 66 3.4 Lewis and the Colonial Development Corporation 75 4 ‘It takes hard work to be accepted in the academic world’: Manchester University, 1948–57 85 4.1 Leaving the LSE 85 4.2 Manchester’s academic community 90 4.3 Overseas assignments and explorations 99 4.4 Annus mirabilis, 1954 105 5 The Manchester Years: Lewis as Social and Political Activist 119 5.1 The South Hulme and Community House social centres, Moss Side 119 5.2 Political action and the Labour Party 137 v vi Contents 6 Why Visiting Economists Fail: The Turning Point in Ghana, 1957–8 145 6.1 Introduction 145 6.2 Lewis in Ghana, 1952–8 146 6.3 Was Lewis an exemplar of ‘why visiting economists fail’? 161 7 Disenchantment in the Caribbean, 1958–63 171 7.1 Introduction 171 7.2 Engagement with the West Indies, 1933–48 172 7.3 Consultant on Caribbean development, 1948–58 183 7.4 University College of the West Indies, 1960–3 186 7.5 The Principal as an economist 194 7.6 The Agony of the Eight 196 7.7 Postscript: The legacy of the Caribbean Development Bank, 1971–4 205 8 Princeton and Retirement, 1963–91 212 8.1 ‘The pleasantest country club in America’ 212 8.2 Picking up the threads, 1964–7 214 8.3 Global economic history, 1967–78 224 8.4 The Nobel Prize, 1979 248 8.5 Winding down, 1980–4 251 8.6 Last years, 1984–91 258 9 ‘The fundamental cure for poverty is not money but knowledge’: Lewis’s Legacy 261 Notes 270 References 315 Index 329 List of Illustrative Material Map 1.1 The Caribbean in the 1930s 3 Figures 1.1 Living and working conditions in the West Indies in the 1930s 5 1.2 Lewis’s early years, as depicted in a 1987 comic strip 7 4.1 Lewis’s old house in West Didsbury, Manchester 89 4.2 The Lewis model (as it originally appeared in Unlimited Supplies of Labour) 109 5.1 Key locations in Hulme and Moss Side 125 5.2 Community House Social Centre prospectus, 1954 127 5.3 Table tennis at the South Hulme Evening Centre, shortly after opening, autumn 1954 130 5.4 Social gathering at Community House, 1954 134 5.5 The West Indian Sports and Social Centre, 2012 136 7.1 The Caribbean Development Bank, Barbados 207 8.1 The Elm Club, Princeton University 236 8.2 Elements in the impact of global growth on the ‘South’, 1870–1913, as portrayed by Lewis (1978) 242 8.3 Strip cartoon of a scene from the life of Sir Arthur Lewis, 1987 257 Table 6.1 Lewis as ‘visiting economist’: incidence of type 1, 2 and 3 errors and their causes, 1943–62 166 vii Preface and Acknowledgements Since we became students of economics and economic history in the 1960s, we have both been fascinated by Lewis’s work. In its wide sweep, its storytelling style, and most of all its passionate commitment to design a better and fairer world and then put that design into practice, it differed greatly from most of the economics we had encountered pre- viously. From the 1970s onwards, Lewis’s writings have inspired much of our research and thinking, and we have been aware of the great debt we owe him, as both writers and practitioners. It has taken until now, forty years later, to start paying back that debt. The first steps along this road were taken in July 2004, when we both attended a conference sponsored by Manchester University to celebrate the 50th anniversary of the publication of Lewis’s Unlimited Supplies of Labour article, at which we both presented papers. Present at that confer- ence were, in particular, Colin Kirkpatrick, the conference organiser and economics professor at Manchester; Robert Tignor, professor of history at Princeton University, USA; Mark Figueroa, professor of economics at the University of the West Indies (UWI), Jamaica; Andrew Downes, pro- fessor of economics at the University of the West Indies, Barbados; and John Toye, professor of economics at Oxford University, and at the time acting as the head of the Centre for the Study of African Economies at Oxford. The Nuffield Foundation, through their administrator Louie Burghes, shortly afterwards awarded us a grant of some £6,000, which enabled us to undertake initial visits to Princeton, Ghana and the West Indies. These individuals constitute the nucleus of the group to whom our warmest thanks are due for initially setting us on the road. Within this group, a special mention is owed to Robert Tignor, who published the first biography of Lewis in late 2005, and who might be forgiven for looking askance at our attempts to dig in the same quarry. In fact, he has been the soul of generosity, encouraging us and setting us right in innumerable ways. Equally indispensable has been the help of John Toye, a long-standing friend of both of us, who read through the entire first draft and made very detailed comments. The general editor of the Great Thinkers in Economics Series, Tony Thirlwall, made valuable comments on our final draft. We made use of a good number of archives, as recorded in the Bibliography, and we are grateful to all the archivists and librarians viii Preface and Acknowledgements ix listed there, who went out of their way to help. We must, however, single out Adriane Hanson, keeper of the Lewis archive at the Mudd Library at Princeton University, for not only putting up with a quite exceptional amount of enquiries from us, but doing so in a creative way that ena- bled us to follow up many leads which would otherwise have run dead; and to Ruth Tait, administrator of the Ahmed Iqbal Ullah Race Relations Resource Centre at Manchester University, a special thank you for put- ting us into contact with the community of Moss Side and with many West Indians, Africans and white Mancunians who remembered the city as it was in the 1950s. Some of these even remembered Lewis, and could therefore speak of him with special authority; and in this regard our special thanks to Barrington Young, Elouise Edwards, Ina Spence and Victor Lawrence of the West Indian Sports and Social Club. This is also the place to thank the other people we interviewed in person: in Britain, Phyllis Deane, Gisela Eisner and Robert Lalljie; and in the United States, Mark Gersovitz, William Baumol, Angus Deaton, Henry Bienen and Gustav Ranis. In visits to the Caribbean we received great help and support from Professor Mark Figueroa at the University of the West Indies, Jamaica, and Professor Andrew Downes at the University of the West Indies, Barbados. Staff at the Caribbean Development Bank were generous with their time and facilities, and particular mention should be made of Sir Neville Nicholls, third president of the Bank and a close professional colleague of Lewis. The Caribbean has important archives. The guidance of Audine Wilkinson, former documentalist at the Institute of Social and Economic Research (ISER) was particularly valuable. Those who kindly granted us permission to reproduce copy- right material are acknowledged under the relevant photographs and figures, and we ask forgiveness of those owners of copyright material whom we have tried and failed to trace. Without the generous help of all these people, who, like us, were keen to see Lewis’s contribution to knowledge more widely recognised, our efforts would have come to nothing. Most biographies are sole-authored rather than being the work of a team or, as in this case, a partnership, and it did not take us long to discover why. Any judgements one makes about an individual’s person- ality, character and achievements inevitably contain much that is sub- jective and emotion-driven, and it would be miraculous if any two such judgements by two people were to concur, even if they knew the person under consideration intimately; and we did not – we have had to extract Lewis’s story from the documentary record and from interviews (listed in the References) with those who did know him well. It is therefore

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