James Meade (1907-1995)

Susan Howson

Introduction

In January 1933, Maynard Keynes judged James Meade to be ‘one of the most promising of the very young but interesting school of Oxford economists’. As he explained, Meade was ‘a Fellow of Hertford [College] of some two years’ standing, and spent a year at Cambridge, where I saw a good deal of him, after taking a first in Modern Greats. I considered him to be of excellent promise then’ (Keynes to Daniel Macmillan, 10 January 1933, Keynes Papers CO/5/80). Meade had been an undergraduate at Oriel College and after graduating with a First in Philosophy, Politics and Economics (PPE) in 1930 had been elected to a Tutorial Fellowship in economics at Hertford on the understanding that he go away for his first year to learn more economics before teaching it. He went to Trinity College, Cambridge, invited by Dennis Robertson, whom he already knew through his family in Bath. He had invited Robertson to Oxford to speak to an undergraduate society in June 1929. This year was ‘the intellectually most exciting year of my life’ (Meade 1988a: 1). He became a member of the Cambridge Circus, the group of young economists including Richard Kahn, Austin and Joan Robinson, and Piero Sraffa, who met to analyse Keynes’s Treatise on Money once it had been published on 31 October 1930. He was thus one of the very first Keynesians.

S. Howson (h)

Professor of Economics, Department of Economics, University of Toronto, Canada

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R.A. Cord (ed.), The Palgrave Companion to Cambridge Economics,

DOI 10.1057/978-1-137-41233-1_32

Meade returned to Cambridge 26 years later as the Professor of Political Economy in succession to Robertson. In between he was lecturing in Oxford until December 1937 when his College gave him leave of absence to edit four issues of the annual World Economic Survey of the Economic Intelligence Service of the League of Nations. He stayed in Geneva for only two and a half years (and edited only two Surveys) because of the Second World War, managing with his wife and young family to drive across falling France in May 1940 in order to take up a position with the British wartime government. In what became the Economic Section of the War Cabinet Offices he was to play a major role in implementing Keynesian policies, both for financing the war and for constructing a better post-war world.

Meade remained in government service until 1947, Deputy Director of the Economic Section from late 1941 until the end of 1945 and Director until September 1947. Before he left government service he returned to Geneva as a British delegate to the Preparatory Commission for an international conference on trade and employment. He returned to academic life at the London School of Economics (LSE) as Professor of Commerce with special reference to International Trade and there accomplished the work in international economics (both macro and trade) for which he was awarded a Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences in 1977.

In his long career Meade wrote on many subjects: price theory and welfare economics, national income accounting, economic growth, economic development and population problems, nationalisation and planning, income distribution and equality, public finance and some aspects of industrial organisation, as well as macroeconomics and international economics. This chapter concentrates on the work in macroeconomics which was influenced by his Cambridge colleagues or influenced them. It falls into three parts, covering his postgraduate year in Cambridge and his work in Oxford following that year, the years in Geneva and London, and his Cambridge years from 1957.