The Radical Reflections of an Applied Economist

In my lifetime I have seen economics become a profession. When I began my university studies in the 1920s, the tradition remained that political economy was a field of literary and philosophical discourse which any serious-minded and cultivated person could enter. But a rapid change was in progress. Already before the First World War the amount of statistical information was growing rapidly, under American stimulus. During the war the Government became involved in economic affairs as never before, and as economic troubles deepened after the war it accepted a new responsibility for the direction of policy. These changes created a widespread sense of the need to achieve a greater understanding of economic affairs, and to train more people to handle the materials of economic administration: so the British universities generally came to provide distinct courses in economics, supported, if not by separate departments, at least by a staff of specialised teachers. The Second World War carried the interpenetration of government and business farther. The increased attention to planning in the years that followed, with the relative expansion of that sort of function in the private as well as the public sectors, brought new openings for economists. They were able to show their usefulness in posts for which their training specially suited them.