Reddaway and Stone

As noted earlier, Reddaway was appointed as the Director of the DAE in 1955 to replace Richard Stone who was given the newly created Chair in Accounting and Finance. Reddaway held this position until 1969. Just as his term as the Director of the DAE was coming to an end, he was elected to become Professor of Political Economy in Cambridge (to succeed James Meade, who had just retired). The Professorship of Political Economy is the most senior Chair in the Faculty of Economics at Cambridge. Reddaway held this position until 1980, when he formally retired. Nevertheless, he continued his association with the Faculty for many years, sometimes giving lectures, or even occasional courses. It was only failing health towards the end of his life that prevented him from continuing.

Until his formal retirement, Reddaway had thus held the two most senior leadership positions in the Faculty: Director of the DAE and Professor of Political Economy. Given the prominence and success of the roles Reddaway occupied, it is interesting to note that although his legacy and influence within Cambridge remains enormous, his impact on academic economists outside of Cambridge was rather smaller, particularly outside the UK. We might, for instance, analyse why Reddaway did not get as much attention from the economics profession as did, for instance, Stone. In retrospect, the appointment of Reddaway to the Directorship of the DAE caused some controversy. Friends of Stone regarded it as a coup against Stone organised by the Cambridge Keynesians who were critical of Stone’s leadership of the Department. Yet Stone, despite his retirement as the Director of the DAE, continued to lead a large research group of his own in the Department. He cooperated with Reddaway and the two economists worked together in harmony. Singh (2006, 2009) has argued that the DAE’s outstanding success in the 1960s was due to the close competition as well as collaboration between Reddaway’s and Stone’s teams. This led to what might be called the Golden Age of applied economics in Cambridge from the 1960s to the 1980s. Reddaway himself denied the allegation of any plot against Dick Stone, although others are not so convinced.^[1]

A former pupil of Reddaway’s, the distinguished British economist Martin Weale, put the reason for Reddaway’s apparent career paradox in the following terms: Reddaway was not a theoretical economist or one interested in the history of economic thought. He liked dealing with practical questions of the day. Once these problems were solved, there was nothing much to be done with these issues. He therefore ignored the deeper questions which might arise from a more stringent examination of the same. Weale demonstrates this idea with the example of the Selective Employment Tax (SET). Once it has been examined, there is not much left to do. One cannot keep on analysing the SET ad infinitum. This is a more plausible explanation for Reddaway’s comparative lack of recognition in the economics profession at large than the argument outlined in Singh (2006)—that Reddaway was not, for example, a leading candidate for a Nobel Prize because of the conservative domination of the profession. The available evidence is more in accord with the hypothesis that Reddaway was not interested in new analysis or new ways of resolving economic issues. He was content with being able to answer day-to-day questions of economic analysis in simple terms rather than shape economic theory to answer more complex questions. In this regard, Stone was much more of an innovator in dealing with economic or empirical issues.

Reddaway and Stone were two different kinds of economists but nevertheless found common ground to work together to produce one of the world’s leading departments of applied economics. Stone was known for his encouragement of rigorous econometric methods and in the early post-war period Cambridge had become home to some of the world’s leading econometricians, including Houthakker (1961, 1965), Prais and Houthakker (1955), Tobin (1958), and Farrell and Brown. As it was widely believed, the best two places in the world for doing theoretical econometrics were Cambridge and the Cowles Commission at Yale University.

On his appointment as Director of the DAE, Reddaway sought to change this emphasis from econometric methods to applied economics. In view of the outstanding reputation of the DAE as a place for doing econometrics, this was a hard act to follow but Reddaway was determined and he carried out his plan with total conviction. Instead of econometrics, the Department began to produce outstanding research in other areas, including British economic history and applied analysis of various economic problems both inside and outside the UK.

During his 15-year tenure, Reddaway oversaw several major economic modelling projects and retained his interest both in policy and planning. He worked on economic growth, on British investment overseas, and the SET. Significantly, his work included productivity growth and technical progress. This important line of work was started initially by Reddaway’s doctoral research student, W.E.G. Salter. After Salter’s untimely death, Reddaway produced a second edition of Salter’s book Productivity and Technical Change (Salter 1969) by updating his analysis. There was similarly during this time outstanding work on many other areas of applied economics, as well as on sociology (by John Goldthorpe and his colleagues). In the meantime, Stone, for independent reasons, also changed his approach to economic analysis. Together with his associate Alan Brown, he launched a big new research project in the DAE, not on econometric methodology but on economic planning in the UK.

• [1] I am grateful to Professor Ron Smith at Birkbeck College, University of London, for permitting me tosee his correspondence with Reddaway on this matter.