Robin Marris (1924-2012)

Adrian Wood

Introduction

Robin Marris, who taught in Cambridge’s Faculty of Economics for a quarter of a century, was known to all economists of his time for his work on business corporations. The words ‘managerial capitalism’ in the title of his best- known book became a standard phrase in economics. He made significant academic contributions in other areas, too, and was an active contributor to policy debates, in which he was not afraid to espouse unpopular causes. What motivated him as an economist was a desire to improve the world, and he constantly used statistics, but all his work was underpinned by theory, which to him was what put economists ahead of ordinary mortals.¹

Marris was born on 31 March 1924 in London. He came up to Cambridge in 1941 to read economics at King’s College. Supervised by Gerald Shove, he got a First in Part I of the Tripos in 1942, but then joined the Royal Air Force. Back in Cambridge in 1945, he was supervised by Richard Kahn and the retired Professor Pigou (who helped teach the ex-servicemen) and graduated with another First in 1947. His contemporaries included Harry

I am deeply grateful to many people who knew Marris for their help and information and to Jamie Galbraith, Mervyn King, William Peterson, and David Vines for comments on a draft of this chapter.

¹ As I soon learned when he dismissed my first undergraduate tutorial essay as ‘high-class journalism’. ^[1]

Johnson, Robert Neild, I.G. Patel, Eric Russell, and Aubrey Silberston. In an autobiographical sketch, Angus Maddison, a 1948 graduate, mentions Marris as one of the fellow students who most influenced him.

In 1951, after working in the Treasury and in Geneva as editor of the publications of the Research Division of the UN Economic Commission for Europe, Marris returned to King’s as a Fellow and as an Assistant Lecturer in the Faculty of Economics (later an Assistant Director of Research 1955, Lecturer 1960, and Reader 1971). After writing for some years on other topics, he achieved worldwide academic recognition for his book on managerial capitalism (Marris 1964a), John Kenneth Galbraith’s references to which in his 1966 Reith Lectures and The New Industrial State made Marris known also to a wider audience. He was invited to spend 1967-1968 at Harvard, where he was drawn into a lively public debate between Galbraith and Robert Solow.

During the 1950s and 1960s, Marris continued a connection with the Labour Party that had started in his student days. When Labour was elected in 1964, he took leave from Cambridge for two years to be Director of the World Economy Division in the Ministry of Overseas Development under Barbara Castle and Anthony Greenwood. Dismayed by the abuse of union power in the 1970s, Marris later became ‘hostile to socialism’, but ‘never swung spiritually to the political right’ (Marris 1996: 1; italics in original) and resumed his support for Labour in the 1990s, dedicating his last book (Marris 1999a) to Clare Short, then Secretary of State for International Development.

In 1959, Marris became King’s College’s Director of Studies in economics. A long series of students, including the present author, benefited from his creative mind and warm personality. Christopher Bliss remembers that ‘he was an inspiring teacher, who always made me feel that I was not just a little student, still learning the trade, but rather a full member of the economics profession’ (Bliss quoted in Wood 2013: 90). In the 1950s, Marris helped Piero Sraffa to direct the Faculty’s research students, running a weekly seminar. Geoff Harcourt recalls that ‘when I arrived, we all fronted up to RLM in the old Marshall library in Downing Street. He was extremely lively and helpful to us all. He tried to bring the Keynesians and the Robertsonians together, for example asking them to the same students’ parties, but had little success’ (Harcourt quoted in ibid.).

In 1976, after 25 years of research and teaching in Cambridge, Marris left forever. The reasons were partly personal—a new American wife—and partly professional—he saw no prospect of getting a chair. Professorships in Cambridge at that time were few and far between, and he was also a somewhat isolated figure in the deeply divided Faculty. As is illustrated by the comments of Bliss and Harcourt (across this divide), Marris avoided taking sides, academically or personally, so no one was strongly on his side. Intellectually and emotionally, however, he never left Cambridge. His most ambitious later research (Marris 1991) was about Cambridge subjects and people.

From Cambridge, Marris went to a chair at the University of Maryland, where he was head of department for three years, and in 1981 to Birkbeck College of the University of London, where again he served for three years as head of department, and from which he retired in 1987. At Maryland, he succeeded in raising academic standards, but in both departments his headships were stormy - and at Birkbeck aggravated by his intolerance of Marxists.

Marris continued to work and write until late in his life about pressing economic and social issues. In 1996, he published a book on deprivation in the UK and followed it up with advisory work on education and crime, the latter for Charles Clarke, a former student who was then Home Secretary. Another book in 1999 addressed poverty at the global level. Marris wrote regularly for the press on macro policy and was strongly in favour of the UK joining the euro. He died on 25 September 2012.

A fuller account of Marris’s life, with more personal details, is in Wood (2013). The following four sections discuss his research. The first considers his early writing, with particular attention to his book on shift work. The second and longest section is about his work on managerial capitalism, the third is about macroeconomics with imperfect competition, and the fourth is about his book on saving the underclass.

• [1] A. Wood (и) Emeritus Professor of International Development, University of Oxford, UKe-mail: This email address is being protected from spam bots, you need Javascript enabled to view it © The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s) 2017 R.A. Cord (ed.), The Palgrave Companion to Cambridge Economics, DOI 10.1057/978-1-137-41233-1_40