Discussion of M. Dreyfus’ Paper

Lord Kaldor said he agreed completely with what M. Dreyfus had said. He asked about the reasons for the French success. Before the Second World War France’s industrial production had been about two-thirds of Great Britain’s and its living standard had been lower. Today it was just the reverse, with France producing about one and a half times as much as Britain, if not more. France’s wages had been lower, now they were considerably higher. France was a success, Britain a failure. He said he was not surprised by this. He saw the basic reason for the difference in past experience in the fact that France had used planning, while Britain had not. In 1946, Jean Monnet set up the Commissariat du Plan of which he, Kaldor, was also an adviser for a time. He became an enthusiastic advocate of the adoption of a similar overall plan for Great Britain, of getting individual firms in different industries together to work out an optimal investment plan to their mutual advantage. But this proposal was badly received. He was regarded as a ‘madman’ who wanted planning — by the bureaucracy in Whitehall. Events had now proved that France was right and Britain was wrong. An important aspect behind this difference lay in the quality of manpower. France had a long tradition of outstanding civil servants, trained in special schools like the École Polytechnique. Britain, on the other hand, had graduates of Oxford and Cambridge who had specialised in Latin and Greek.