News from Sweden

Luck is hardly a respectable word for the economist. The conduct which he studies is claimed to be understandable, accountable and predictable because it flows from reason applied to a complete relevant knowledge of circumstance. But luck is a circumstance only known ex post. It is something which we cannot secure by forethought or endeavour which we cannot legislate for, except by maintaining liquidity as a means of coping with the uncovenanted and the unknown. Yet the writer of this memoir, having long since averred that luck is a factor of production, can support that view by his own unforgettable experience. For as a research student newly come to L.S.E. in the first days of 1935 I heard Brinley Thomas, just returned from Sweden, lecture on the momentous ideas which he had learnt there from the heirs of Wicksell, from Lindahl, Myrdal and Ohlin. For me these lectures were a torch lighting up my world of thought and setting fire to my imagination, and the fact of my being there to hear them, at the one moment, in the one place, from the one man who could convey them, was in retrospect a piece of luck incomparable and scarcely believeable. But this was the mere temporal and spatial frame of things. For Brinley himself, the runner from Marathon, the interpreter of the oracle, the bringer of still-Delphic words, was of all teachers of economics of my time the one most charged with celestial fire, the one who swept the brain of at least one hearer with a rustling wind of inspiration.