Cambridge Economics in the Post-Keynesian Era: The Eclipse of Heterodox Traditions

1218 Pages·2022·10.51 MB·English

by  Ashwani Saith

PALGRAVE STUDIES IN THE HISTORY OF ECONOMIC THOUGHT
Cambridge Economics
in the Post-Keynesian Era
The Eclipse of Heterodox Traditions
Ashwani Saith
Palgrave Studies in the History of Economic Thought
Series Editors
Avi J. Cohen
Department of Economics
York University & University of Toronto
Toronto, ON, Canada
G. C. Harcourt
School of Economics
University of New South Wales
Sydney, NSW, Australia
Peter Kriesler
School of Economics
University of New South Wales
Sydney, NSW, Australia
Jan Toporowski
Economics Department,
SOAS University of London
London, UK
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Ashwani Saith
Cambridge Economics
in the Post-Keynesian
Era
The Eclipse of Heterodox Traditions
Ashwani Saith
International Institute of Social Studies
Erasmus University Rotterdam (EUR)
The Hague, The Netherlands
ISSN 2662-6578 ISSN 2662-6586 (electronic)
Palgrave Studies in the History of Economic Thought
ISBN 978-3-030-93018-9 ISBN 978-3-030-93019-6 (eBook)
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-93019-6
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P
reface
a Subaltern WindoW
One thing leads to another, and hindsight often makes one wish it hadn’t. The
project of this book emerged organically from the earlier intellectual biography
of Ajit Singh (Saith 2019), in particular from the short narrative there on
‘Faculty Wars’ in which Ajit was a key figure. That chapter provided an intro-
ductory, highly compressed version of the untold story, and the folded leaves
of that concertina are opened to full stretch in this book, relying on a much
wider range of archival and other inputs.
An effort has been made, as far as reasonably possible, to keep the persona
of the author out of the narrative, even though I spent much of the 1970s in
Cambridge, the time when the battle lines were being drawn for the purges to
come. I had arrived as a doctoral researcher in 1972, the momentous year
when Frank Hahn returned triumphantly to a professorship in Cambridge, and
so was part of the melee—initially as an observer and then for a couple of years
as an occasional protagonist when I joined the Faculty in a lowly academic
position reserved for slaves serving the professoriate. As such I had the ques-
tionable benefit of being both a marginal participant and a non-participant,
observer viewing events unfold through the personal window of my cubby hole
in the DAE wing on the top floor of the Faculty building. Life as a PhD scholar
was seriously underprivileged but wildly exciting; the temptations and entice-
ments in the ever-changing window displays at Bowes and Bowes—said to have
been the oldest bookshop in Britain, now sadly gone—guaranteeing a quick
slide into what Amit Bhaduri termed perpetual indebtedness; it was a tough
choice: the delights of The Copper Kettle (as was, not as is) on King’s Parade,
or the odd pint or two at the Hat & Feathers on Barton Road, or treats from
the kindly old ladies of Fitzbillies (again, as was, not as is) versus the tactile
pleasure of leafing through one’s own copies of Mario Nuti’s pair of edited
volumes of essays of Michal Kalecki, then hot off the press; Kalecki easily won
that one, but there were fresh challenges; the following week saw the bespec-
tacled young Gramsci looking one in the eye over the title of Selections from the
v
vi PREFACE
Prison Notebooks of Antonio Gramsci. Natural empathy and political solidarity
with the cause of the striking coal miners was intensified by personal experi-
ence, as the OPEC price hikes worked their cost-plus way through to one’s
shopping basket, quickly halving the real value of the meagre Commonwealth
scholarship stipend of GBP 78 per month—much of it earmarked for the
Trinity landlady on Grange Road who might well have been charging a loca-
tional quasi-rent on account of being next door to the Robinsons—making a
luxury even of the weekly 3-pound, 3-minute trunk calls to ‘back home’ from
the red ‘Dr Who time-machine’ phonebooths. Half-way through, Rekha, my
wife, registered for a PhD in Sociology, widening the interface with local intel-
lectual life. The decade of the 1970s saw the arrival of a large cohort of PhD
scholars from South Asia, with enough bench strength to kick off its own dedi-
cated seminar and, needless to say, its own cricket team which took the field
against a Faculty XI, replete with dodgy umpiring and dubious scorekeeping,
usually with a return revenge game. Survival, or at least getting to the jam part
of Micawber’s equation, depended on the acquisition of college assignments
for supervising undergraduate groups, and earnings were generally around
GBP 2–3 per session per group of 2–3 students—the tiny payment slips were
eagerly awaited and cheque withdrawal amounts at Lloyds on Trinity Street
seldom exceeded the luxurious amount of GBP 5/-. As with mountain climb-
ing or village field-work in the Indian summer, these ‘character-forming’ expe-
riences all seem rather more exciting from the safety of a distant future; on the
ground in real time, it was more an episode, with reruns, of hard times. Things
eased when I was offered the post of Faculty Assistant in Research (FAR), a
position I held for two years, bringing with it the thrill of close continuous
contact with DAE and Faculty members otherwise only spotted distantly at
Sidgwick Site as they disappeared into their respective sides of the building or
encountered in the IBM Computer Room, access to which was through a
bizarre route: males and females had to walk through their respective conve-
nience facilities on the lower ground floor under the Marshall Library to re-
emerge and be reunited in a dark corridor (stacked with boxes of supplies) in
the dungeon on the other side, where there was a research students’ workroom
with a couple of discarded typewriters waiting their time to enter antique auc-
tions, but also a couple of gleaming devices that were worth getting up early
for: a Hermes manual typewriter—IBM golf-ball typewriters were still a long
way into the future—and an electronic calculator with a huge footprint and a
lurid red display of about a dozen digits, of which any 2 or 3 would have to be
guessed as some horizontal or vertical section was always on the blink. Passage
through the doors at the far end got you into the small engine room: there
were the card punching and reading machines and the IBM computer, and
here you waited anxiously for the beast to spit out your results, putting you
instantly in a buoyant or foul mood.
As the FAR slave, I was assigned to work with William Brian Reddaway
(WBR) and Ajit Singh, mostly to produce the weekly class statistical handouts
that Brian was cunningly devising to bamboozle, harangue and then enlighten
PREFACE vii
undergrads in his upcoming lecture.1 This was a daunting, but hugely reward-
ing learning exercise; WBR took no hostages, was very demanding, quite
brusque though never unfriendly or impolite; and on rare occasions he even
managed a smile and a compliment, well measured, lest it might lead to any
smidge of complacency. A regular stream of Reddaway-type tasks: This, or that,
can’t be random; can you do some scatters and check? Why do you have the
same number of decimal spaces for all the columns of the table? Somehow, this
number (in a publication) doesn’t seem right, please go back to the original
source and check it is a misprint there; and so on. In between, there were
exchanges about real applied economics, what the tables were all about, pos-
sible explanations and qualifications, as he would sometimes try out some part
in his upcoming lecture using me as a proxy for the class. He was genuinely
delighted at my independently acquired facility with the double-quick, rough-
and- ready Reddaway-method of deseasonalising time series. The Faculty tea-
room was usually to be avoided, not least because there was an existential
uncertainty about the nature of the experience lying in wait, ranging from
being in the crowds enjoying an entertaining biff-baff between some seniors,
to suddenly being biffed and baffed yourself over some stray remark. The
Buttery provided the more predictably congenial company of PhD co-
workers—a time for frivolity and seriousness in equal measure before everyone
disappeared again with furrowed brows to plough their data sets or equations.
The market for information, aka gossip, was far from being missing—if any-
thing, there was a high velocity of circulation and a tale heard today was reheard
from another source a day or two later enlivened by additional spicing. And of
course, there was enough to grin or grumble about, given the fractions and
frictions within the deeply divided Faculty; each week brought a fresh tourna-
ment of jousting white knights and blackguards. At my personal humble level,
this extended sojourn in the 1970s served as a great observation post for keep-
ing track of the daily skirmishes and battles across the divide. In the narrative
that follows, I have assiduously attempted to avoid undue reliance on personal
experience though inevitably this will have influenced, perhaps subliminally,
the gathering and interpretation of ‘evidence’ and ‘facts’.
the Rashomon Syndrome
The narrative stretches more than might be usual across time and space, loca-
tions and events, and so occupies a panoramic canvas. Assorted materials are
used: archival sources for the investigation of some of the key episodes; pub-
lished personal recollections of various actors and commentators, some long
1 A cherished acquisition then was an acknowledgement in the first footnote on the first page of
the first article, ‘What has become of Employment Policy?’ by Joan Robinson and Frank Wilkinson,
in the first issue of the first volume of Cambridge Journal of Economics; a lot of self-proclaimed
firsts’ there, utterly trivial to the wider world, but for a few days I did not need the lift or staircase,
I could just float up on a cloud to my top-floor cubicle in the Faculty building—what little it took
to lift the spirits of slaves.
viii PREFACE
lost; and inputs from interviews or communications with several surviving
members of the cast, many of whom had direct personal experience of the
events. It cannot be said that the characters and actors are all fictional and bear
no resemblance to any real person living or dead. That caveat does not apply;
as far as possible, the players are named and made to speak for themselves in
their own words drawn from archival and secondary sources, often via inter-
views available in the public domain. It needs to be emphasised that the pur-
pose of the book is to investigate the reorientation of the trajectory of economics
as a discipline in Cambridge; while the views and actions of specific individuals
or groups are scrutinised and interrogated, this is not to be interpreted as, or
conflated in any way, with impugning in any form the character or integrity of
the persons concerned; the interpretations and commentaries are strictly
intended to be kept at the intellectual level within this extended case study of
the sociology of ‘knowledge’ production and control.
A declaration of interest as an author: no disingenuous pretence is made of
being ‘neutral’, and the story telling is not ‘impartial’, or ‘balanced’, say a là
BBC News, where an artificial superficial equality is notionally projected by
granting each side equal media time for making their respective ‘party political
broadcasts’. It follows, rather, the BBC Panorama ‘expose’ template; it is
explicitly an uncompromising narrative from one side of the battle lines and, as
with the reporting of a war correspondent, the narrative consciously and admit-
tedly tells one ‘truth’ as revealed by available evidence while explicitly acknowl-
edging its relativity and mindfully highlighting its perceived contingencies and
qualifications. There are very many more tomes by victors on how they won
their wars than by losers on how these were lost; the triumphalist history
according to the orthodox victors has been told and retold; it has become part
of the Cambridge ether; in contrast, stories and memories from the other side
have generally tended to lapse into a distressed post-trauma silence—but there
are still voices from the scattered periphery or beyond the grave that need to be
recorded and archived so that they are not obliterated altogether.
Lawrence Klein (1991: 108) set out his personal retrospective view of the
1944–1947 years at the Cowles Commission, induced by his dissatisfaction at
the available ‘insider’ and ‘outsider’ accounts of that dynamic formative period.
The econometrician suddenly turns anthropological in method: “some of the
published accounts are from scholars who were not on hand for the whole
period of interest to me, and some are based purely on historical research.
Without having been on the scene, historians cannot capture voice inflections,
gestures, body language, purely oral commentary (often informal discussion)
and other pieces of unrecorded information. There were daily discussions and
frequent reliance on oral traditions at the Cowles Commission, then, and the
‘outside’ accounts sometimes miss relevant points that related to this reliance
on oral tradition. Lapses of memory can also affect ‘insider’ views.” In the pres-
ent case of the Cambridge purges, the acknowledged issues of the methodol-
ogy of memory recall are compounded by the traumatic nature of the experience
that the memory is meant to hold. Often, as a survival mechanism, memories
PREFACE ix
of periods of acute episodic distress are shut down and not easily revived and
reached, and this applies both to short-term post-trauma memory loss and to
time-distant experiences, indicative perhaps of some form of a generic
syndrome- labelled dissociative amnesia. Said one, when asked: “That whole
period around 1984–1985 is a bit hazy for me, maybe the sheer unpleasantness
of what happened during the period is something that I have expunged from
my memory”; said another apologetically: “Sorry my memory is a bit confused.
It was a very trying time for many of us and for many years I have done my best
to put it behind me”; and said a third: “I feel a bit depressed whenever I think
about Cambridge and so I put things off (I am usually a rather cheery per-
son)”; [the respondent referred to the narrative of this book as] “rather
depressing even upsetting”; and there were other similar reactions as well.
Fortunately, or rather unfortunately, a sufficient number of persons had been
cleansed through the purges to enable the construction and validation of what
could be appropriately regarded as a collective syncretic memory through
rounds of iteration and triangulation, including testing against documentary or
archival evidence where available.
The admittedly idiosyncratic writing style takes its inspiration from manner,
and manners, of the protagonists in their debates and duels; draining away all
that passion in favour of a dismal, dour narration normally associated with the
discipline of economics would be disrespectful of the fiery no-holds-barred
Cambridge tradition of face-to-face intellectual exchanges in those times, and
the reader might encounter a scattering of passages that carry a polemical,
pamphleteering or on occasion even a prosecutorial air, and it can only be
hoped that this might lighten and brighten the reader’s lengthy journey.
While this rendition cannot really escape being partial, in both senses of the
word, there is a fair attempt at being fair, though not at the expense of not call-
ing a spade what it really is. I have had the benefit of close consultations with
several of those intimately involved in the narratives and they are all wholly
absolved of the responsibility for any errors of fact or interpretation that I
might have accidentally made. Indeed, following the proverbial pejorative,
these ‘n’ economists might well hold ‘n+1’ opinions about some of the stories
told. As emphasised in the intellectual biography of Ajit Singh, the lead politi-
cal commissar and Chief Whip of the radical heterodox tribes in these battles,
the narrative resonates with Ryunosuke Akutagawa’s Rashomon, immortalised
by Akira Kurosawa, or Lawrence Durrell’s The Alexandria Quartet—the door
remains ajar for readers to enter the open space of oral history with their ver-
sions of what happened, whodunnit and howdunnit, and to express their pref-
erences and choices about how it all transpired. At a minimum, what I have
attempted is to insert one rendition of the story as seen from the perspectives
of the vanquished, firmly into this choice set.