From the Treasury to Multiple-Shift Work
Marris’s first publication (Robinson and Marris 1950),[1] defended UK government support for agriculture against the criticism that the resources would be better used for producing exports to buy food imports, on the grounds that the price elasticity of demand for UK exports was low. In Marris (1955) he argued on the same grounds that the UK government’s entire policy of promoting exports was misguided.
In retrospect, and as his critics argued at the time, Marris was greatly underestimating the elasticity of demand, on the basis of work he had started with Kenneth Berrill in the Treasury in 1947. He inferred a price elasticity of about one-half from a long-standing inverse relationship between the UK’s export volume and its terms of trade which in reality probably mainly reflected the effect of fluctuating commodity prices on the purchasing power of major UK trading partners.
His first solo article, in 1954, was a comparison between the UK and the Netherlands of the—still fairly novel—role of economics and economists in government. His evidence for the UK came from his time in the Treasury, though he had worked in the Central Economic Planning Staff (CEPS) (coordinating the policies of different ministries) rather than in the Economic Section with which his article is largely concerned and which as a matter of official policy refused to give any help with, or comments on, the article.[2] By contrast, his evidence for the Netherlands came from extensive interviews with staff and publications of their larger and more open Centraal Planbureau.
The article, regularly cited over the next two decades, compares the UK’s ‘arithmetic’ approach to macro forecasting with the ‘algebraic’ approach of the Netherlands, where the Planbureau, directed by Jan Tinbergen, used an econometric model (of which a five-person team could invert the matrix in less than three days!). Marris favoured the algebraic approach, although he was aware of the risks of ‘its operators becoming wedded to belief in the stability of relationships (parameters) which are not in fact stable’ (Marris 1954: 772). He admitted that neither system could as yet be shown to be superior to the other, but saw the way forward for the UK government as greater professionalisation of its economic work—which happened 10 years later with the formation of the Government Economic Service.
In a Review of Economic Studies (RES) article on measuring the share of the public sector (Marris 1954-1955), he neatly explains that the right measure depends on the question being asked and calculates an appropriate set of numbers, all lower than the often-claimed 40%. Having criticised in this article Ursula Hicks (among others), Marris in another RES article in 1957 criticises John Hicks for claiming that a Paasche index exceeding a Laspeyres index is evidence of a change in tastes. In this technically skilful article, which acknowledges help from David Champernowne, Harry Johnson, Richard Kahn, and Brian Reddaway, Marris also shows that Fisher’s ideal index (the geometric mean of Laspeyres and Paasche) is ‘more ideal than has sometimes been realised’ (Marris 1957: 38), though he revised his opinion of Fisher downwards in a later article on the International Comparison Project (Marris 1984: 48-49).
Marris’s first book, Economic Arithmetic (Marris 1958), is an applied statistics text, probably based on his Cambridge lectures, which approaches the economy as a body to be dissected with a selection of instruments. As the word ‘arithmetic’ in its title suggests, following the distinction that Marris had drawn between the UK and the Netherlands, the focus of the book is not on statistical techniques, but on economic interpretation of data by fairly simple methods, informed by theory. The exposition is clear, engaging, and packed with practical advice. The most technical section, nearly half of the book, is on index numbers, reflecting Marris’s research interest in this topic.
In 1954, with funding from the Ministry of Labour, Marris began a research project on multiple-shift work, whose results were eventually published in The Economics of Capital Utilisation (Marris 1964b). Starting from the fact that capital equipment on average is used for less than a quarter of all the hours in the year, the questions were why this is so, whether it is desirable, and what if anything should be done about it. The first four chapters—almost half of the book, and the main cause of its delayed publication—set out a theory of the choice of the planned level of multiple-shift work by a profit-oriented business. These chapters creatively develop concepts and relationships that formalise a wide range of practical considerations, including coordination of different processes and demand-side restraints on the output of particular plants.
The next five chapters test the theory against a battery of evidence, including statistics from the 1951 Census of Production, enquiries involving employment exchanges, the factory inspectorate, bus companies (on transport difficulties for shift workers) and unions, and case studies of 11 industries based on questionnaires and interviews. The results confirmed that multiple-shift work was rare—involving only one-eighth of all employees—and concentrated on a few industries and large plants. Only in special circumstances is multiple-shift work profitable. The benefits of its more intensive use of equipment are usually more than offset by its higher wage costs (at that time partly because it was illegal for women to work at night).
Marris had initially believed that the low level of multiple-shift work was economically irrational—a result of ignorance and inertia—and that its widespread extension would be desirable. Several years of research changed his mind, so the policy implications of the book were more limited than he had anticipated. Nonetheless, the book, whose methods were greatly influenced by ‘local colleagues and traditions’ in Cambridge (ibid.: xvi), was widely recognised as a major pioneering contribution and is reported in Google Scholar to have been cited by almost 200 subsequent studies of various aspects of capital utilisation.
- [1] This article, co-authored with Austin Robinson, probably played a part in Marris’s return to a job inCambridge soon thereafter. In a personal communication, Geoff Harcourt writes: ‘We were told thatAustin R brought Robin and Ken [Berrill] to Cambridge after the war as the two brightest grad. studentsin the country’.
- [2] Evidence that he worked in the CEPS is in the first footnote of Marris (1955).
