Phyllis Deane (1918-2012)

Heinrich Bortis

Introduction

Phyllis Deane was a Cambridge economist par excellence, forged in a continuous association with her University from 1950 onwards. As early as the late 1930s, when she was an undergraduate at Glasgow, Keynes and Marshall initiated her thinking in economics, which she combined with history from the beginning. Subsequently, Deane went her own, very specific and original way. In the 1940s, she started from empirical groundwork on colonial accounting, inspired by Keynes, went through fundamental work in economic history, then on to the history of economic ideas, and ended up in profound reflections on economic science and the art of political economy. Her work brought out into the open two important hallmarks of the Cambridge economist, the comprehensive and balanced way of thinking, and the endeavour to get down to the fundamentals.

Following up some biographical notes, Deane’s life work will be presented under the three headings: first, economic history and economic development, second, history of economic ideas and political economy, and, third, political economy and economic science.

H. Bortis (*)

Emeritus Professor of Political Economy, University of Fribourg, Switzerland e-mail: This email address is being protected from spam bots, you need Javascript enabled to view it

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

DOI 10.1057/978-1-137-41233-1_39

Phyllis Mary Deane was born in Hong Kong shortly before the end of hostilities in the First World War. Her father settled in Glasgow after the war, and Phyllis attended Hutchesons’ Girls’ Grammar School in the city. She then went on to Glasgow University, where in 1940 she gained an MA in economics and history (see Davison 2012). This most fruitful combination of subjects would crucially shape her academic career.

At Glasgow, Deane was strongly influenced by two teachers: first, Professor W.R. Scott, significantly an economist and a historian, famous for his three volumes on The Constitution and Finance of English, Scottish and Irish Joint- Stock Companies to 1720 (published between 1910 and 1912), a work she considered a treasure. Second was

Alec Cairncross, who then was very young [b. 1911, captivatingly brilliant] and fresh from Cambridge with The General Theory clutched in his hand which he introduced to us at a fairly early stage. This was in 1938—39. My interest was stimulated by this, and so I did more economics and economic history, although there was a steady stream of political and constitutional history in the course (Deane in Crafts and Humphries 1996: 3).

Moreover,

I think that living through the 1930s made one much more receptive to the sort of economic policy which was emerging from, say, the General Theory, and made one understand what the high level of unemployment meant for a place like Glasgow, where in some areas something like 60% of the people—in Clydebank, for example—were out of work and you saw it actually happening. So I suppose it gave me a rather strong interest in the importance of income distribution as well as growth. And of the importance of economic policy and the influence of ideas on policy (ibid.: 5).

Deane took her finals at Glasgow at the beginning of June 1940. Then she went straight into a research project run by Professor J.R. Bellerby—on postwar economic reconstruction. There was a general belief at the time that the end of the war was just a year or two away, and that everybody had to be ready for economic reconstruction after the war. Deane was invited to London to join the National Institute of Economic and Social Research, where she undertook a project inspired by Keynes, Stone, and Meade who had just set up a system of social accounts for the UK. What Keynes wanted was to apply this system to a completely different economy than the UK, for example, to colonial territories. Subsequently, Deane worked in London through most of the war using the Colonial Office library and other such sources, trying to work out national income for Northern Rhodesia and Jamaica and attempting to set the results into a system of social accounts. Here, she was very fortunate in having Austin Robinson as a supervisor. Many well-known economists were working in Whitehall for the war effort, including Robinson, Stone, and Arthur Lewis who regularly came over to the National Institute to advise her on her work. So Deane started out with an advantage that few research students have. At the end of the war, she visited developing countries to find out what conditions were like on the ground. In 1946-1947, she went to Northern Rhodesia and Nyasaland to produce national income accounts for both colonies (see ibid.: 4).

On this solid theoretical and empirical basis, her career went on smoothly. In 1950, she was invited by Stone to join him at the Department of Applied Economics in Cambridge (established with Maynard Keynes in mind as Director before he died in 1946). The next step was teaching, ‘and as a clear and direct thinker and speaker, [Deane] did very well. She became a Lecturer in Economics in 1961, Reader in Economic History in 1971, and Professor of Economic History for the two years before she retired in 1983’ (Harte 2012). Deane was an excellent and efficient organiser:

She edited the Economic Journal from 1968 to 1975, and she was President of the Royal Economic Society in 1980-82. For many years she represented the Royal Economic Society on the Council of the Economic History Society. She worked hard for Newnham College in Cambridge, where she was an active Fellow from 1961. She was made a Fellow of the British Academy in 1980. [‘In 2010, she was made Distinguished Fellow of the History of Economics Society’ (Harcourt 2012).] Direct, careful, caring, sensible, brisk when necessary, nononsense; she had a look in her eyes that was [sometimes] sceptical, certainly undermining of pomposity in any form (Harte 2012).