The Age of Decline (1973-2016)

By this time the decline of Cambridge Post Keynesianism was already evident. The British system of compulsory retirement at age 67 saw Sraffa removed from the University payroll in 1965, followed by Robinson in 1971, Kahn in 1972 and Kaldor in 1975. Of course, this did not stop them writing for publication (and it would have been unnecessary to achieve this in the case of Sraffa, who had already stopped), but it did further reduce their ability to influence appointments, course content and the general climate of opinion in Cambridge economics. Famously, the retirement of Kahn required only one capital letter to be changed on the door of his professorial office, as he was replaced by the devoutly neoclassical general equilibrium theorist Frank Hahn. The second generation of Cambridge Post Keynesians was not favoured in the promotion process. Efforts to obtain a chair for Pasinetti and for Kaldor’s brilliant young protege, Adrian Wood, both failed, resulting in their departure from Cambridge, Wood going to Sussex and Pasinetti returning home to Italy.

The relatively few remaining Post Keynesians in Cambridge did, at long last, have an introductory textbook to teach from, with the publication of An Introduction to Modern Economics by Robinson and Eatwell (1973). Sadly, it proved to be both a commercial and a pedagogic failure. Robinson’s intention had been to write a book that would capture the American market and knock

Samuelson off his perch. But she had little or no experience of first-year teaching, and she proved unwilling to respond to comments from the small group of highly able students who had been recruited to comment on early drafts of the text. The book proved to be extremely idiosyncratic in both structure and content, so much so that—unlike Samuelson’s Economics—it did not really feel like a textbook. Reviewers deemed it too difficult for beginners, and it sold poorly. A second, paperback, edition appeared in 1974 but it fared no better and the book soon sank, almost without trace (King and Millmow 2003; Harcourt and Kerr (2009: Chapter 10) offer a rather more favourable assessment).

Its failure was more a symptom of decline than a cause. The global wave of student radicalism did not long outlive the 1960s. The tide was turning against all forms of heterodox economics in the early 1970s, and even the watered-down IS-LM Keynesianism of the neoclassical synthesis was coming under sustained attack from Monetarism Mark I (the product of Milton Friedman) and Mark II (the brainchild of Robert Lucas). Moreover—to change metaphors—the centre of gravitation in academic economics had long since shifted across the Atlantic to the USA. Even if the Cambridge Post Keynesians had been united, well organised, well led and consistently hospitable to outsiders and considerate towards potential allies, it seems unlikely that the second generation could ever have enjoyed the same success as the pioneers.

These pioneers must nevertheless shoulder some of the blame. Pasinetti offers a much less favourable judgement on his Cambridge Keynesians than Harcourt’s appreciative account of his Cambridge Post Keynesians. They failed to take the neoclassical synthesis seriously enough, Pasinetti maintains, and therefore did not attack it with sufficient vigour (Pasinetti 2007: 29-33, 60). They did not recognise the extent of the revolution in economic theory that was required; even Joan Robinson was ambivalent on this critical issue (ibid.: 38, fn. 11). At the same time they were too destructive, and failed to provide enough constructive theoretical development (ibid.: 199). The Cambridge Keynesians were too divided among themselves to form a coherent school (ibid.: 62). This was reinforced by ‘the Cambridge prima donna syndrome’ (ibid.: 46, fn. 18), and by their exclusiveness towards outsiders, illustrated by the famous ‘secret seminar’, which was not in any sense a secret but was strictly ‘by invitation only’ (ibid.: 201). Such conduct had some undesirable consequences, in particular, contributing to ‘the impatience of many brilliant young economists, who resented what they regarded as a sort of intellectual imposition, which they felt to be unacceptable’. This resentment was an

‘instinctive reaction to the unwise behaviour of those who should have acted as responsible masters, but didn’t’ (ibid.: 203; cf. Pasinetti 2005: 839).

I suspect that Pasinetti’s criticisms are entirely correct, but they do not go quite far enough. For one thing, he is much too kind on the question of the work rate of the Cambridge Keynesians. Kaldor and Robinson are certainly above reproach in this regard, publishing prolifically and travelling the world to attend conferences and to give guest lectures in which they propagated the new ideas. At the other extreme, Sraffa’s inability to write on anything other than classical political economy for most of the final half century of his life is all too well known. Pasinetti does pass a severely adverse judgement on Goodwin, and with good reason: the American published very little in his 28 years as a Fellow of Peterhouse, and seems to have spent most of his time painting. Pasinetti does not offer an explanation for this strange behaviour; possibly the ambience in his College, brilliantly parodied in Tom Sharpe’s comic novel Porterhouse Blue (Sharpe 1976), was partly to blame. Since Goodwin was one of only two of the five Cambridge Keynesians with any serious mathematical training—the other being Kahn, who had a degree in physics—the opportunity cost of his paintings was appreciable, as was demonstrated by the fine theoretical work that he did eventually produce at the University of Siena in the 1980s. By then, of course, it was much too late. Goodwin’s bizarre decision, at age 67, to apply for a chair at Siena through an open competition with candidates decades younger than he was, possibly indicates some remorse at all the wasted years, though Pasinetti does not speculate on this.

Neither does he comment on the unfulfilled promise that was Richard Kahn in the final half century of his life. In 1929-1931, Kahn had produced two outstanding pieces of economic analysis, on the short-period theory of the firm and on the multiplier. Between 1930 and 1935 he worked closely with Keynes, making a valuable contribution to the final version of The General Theory. But Kahn published very little of substance between 1935 and 1984, when the text of his 1978 Mattioli Lectures appeared; even his 1929 dissertation came out in English only in the year of his death (Kahn 1984, 1989). After 1945, at least, he could not claim the pressure of other duties as an excuse: he had stopped undergraduate teaching on his appointment to a personal chair in 1951, which he held until his retirement in 1972 (Pasinetti 2007: 72). What on earth did he do with himself in all those years? Pasinetti also reports Kahn’s growing unhappiness: ‘[H]e was saddened by the turn that mainstream economics had taken. In his last few years he was a very deeply disappointed man’ (ibid.: 77).

Pasinetti also understates his case when it comes to the personal relations between the Cambridge Keynesians. ‘Exclusiveness’ was only part of the problem. Intellectual arrogance was undoubtedly another, and helps to explain why none of the Cambridge Keynesians ever took the trouble (before 1973) to write a systematic and comprehensive critique of the neoclassical synthesis, or even of its IS-LM component.

The Cambridge Keynesians’ inability to collaborate with anyone must also have hindered the formation of a cohesive school. After 1945 they never published joint papers with each other, and only very rarely with third parties as co-author. One reason for this—as we have seen, and again not mentioned by Pasinetti—was that Kaldor and Robinson fell out in a very big way in the late 1950s, and their relations thereafter were characterised by deep antagonism. In the critical years (roughly, 1955-1975), they were totally incapable of forming a common front on any issue, intellectual or administrative.

Would things have turned out differently if Michai Kalecki had stayed in Cambridge? Might he have provided the unifying leadership that the Cambridge Post Keynesians so badly needed, and failed to find, after the death of Keynes? Probably not: Robinson just might have accepted Kalecki’s leadership, but it is very hard to see Kaldor doing so. Jan Toporowski reminds me that Kahn remained ‘irredeemably Marshallian and devoted to the genius of Keynes’s theoretical breakthrough’, while ‘Kalecki would have fallen out with Goodwin and Sraffa over wages theory’. In any case, after 1936 the Polish theorist himself became ‘more and more conscious of his own priority and wanted it acknowledged’ (personal communication, 5 May 2015). None of the Cambridge Post Keynesians would have been at all happy with that.

The growing disharmony in the Post Keynesian camp cannot have helped in the recruitment of a second generation of young theorists capable of continuing the work of the pioneers. Precisely who was deterred from moving to Cambridge, when and under what circumstances, remains unclear. Pasinetti provides just two names: Harry Johnson and Robin Marris (Pasinetti 2007: 40, fn. 14). It is difficult to imagine Johnson as a loyal Cambridge Keynesian under any circumstances, but Marris might have become a valuable recruit. There is a very interesting oral history project here for someone, interviewing other economists with Keynesian sympathies who before the mid-1970s had been deterred from pursuing a career in Cambridge by the behaviour of the Cambridge Keynesians; but it had better be undertaken soon, while the individuals concerned are still with us.

Finally, there are a number of unanswered questions of a more mundane kind. Did the first generation of Cambridge Keynesians pull their weight in matters of university administration? Did they try to influence academic appointments, but fail? Was the college system a handicap, restricting the ability of the Faculty of Economics to appoint on merit rather than Porterhouse-style sociability, or an advantage, offering a degree of decentralisation in decisionmaking that made it easier for an embattled minority to survive? Was there organised opposition to the Cambridge Keynesians and, if so, when and from whom? Who were the potential recruits to the Keynesian cause who applied for teaching jobs but were turned down? Did the notorious weaknesses of the Cambridge PhD system in this period identified by Kemp (poor supervision, intellectual isolation and lack of appreciation by senior staff) act as a significant deterrent to graduate students, especially from North America? Administrative histories of university departments are usually smugly self-congratulatory, or deeply tedious, or both. In the specific case of economics at Cambridge, however, where important issues of intellectual history are at stake, a systematic scholarly study of the period 1950-1975, conducted by a political scientist (or possibly by a social anthropologist), would be worthwhile.