Robin and Chess
A consuming passion of Robin’s was the solution of chess problems. At the Memorial Service for Robin, Michael Lipton, also a chess tragic who collaborated with Robin on one book, said: ‘For all his human qualities, Robin’s career was in large part a life of the mind, lived mainly through economics and chess problems’ (Lipton 2010: 20). ‘[He] was unique in his joint distinction in both areas’ (ibid.: 23). He concluded:
Robin’s chess composition, like much of his economics, is an implicit commentary on the scope, meaning and limits of economisation as a guiding principle. His best chess problems will preserve his name forever ... [M]uch of his economics will long be read and analysed for its integrity, balance and new, often deep, never trendy insights ... [T]he uniqueness of his intellectual life lies in bridging.. .at a high level, these two very different worlds (ibid.: 24).
Further Activities
Though I used to tease Robin on the basis of his limited success in ‘reforming’ the Cambridge Faculty[1] so that his comparative advantage lay much more in scholarship than changing administrative regulations, the late Aubrey Silberston in his affectionate and joint tribute to his great friend in the January
2011 RES Newsletter pointed out that ‘Robin had considerable success in administration in other spheres’, especially the SSRC and Clare. He writes:
Robin faced opposition to the SSRC from Margaret Thatcher...but did not have the major problems that Michael Posner encountered a few years later. [Nevertheless,] Robin did an excellent job as Chairman...,with his outstanding mind, his strong sense of fairness and his ability to steer in an acceptable way, in a clear and rational manner, on important funding issues affecting many different institutions and individuals (Silberston 2011: 12).
Though Robin was never an economic policy advisor to any government (he was to the Social Democratic Party (SDP)), he nevertheless played an important role in public discussions of appropriate policies for the UK government. Silberston tells us that soon after Robin came to Clare, he and Alec Caincross ‘decided there was room for an informal group of economists who could tackle conflicting views of the problems of the British economy’ (ibid.). The CLARE Group was born in 1976 and ran to 2002; it included economists from ‘some dozen different institutions—Reddaway, Feinstein, Posner (Cambridge), David Henderson, Tony Atkinson, Silberston (London), Caincross, John Fleming, Peter Oppenheimer (Oxford), Dick Sargent, Marcus Miller (Warwick). Other members were John Kay, Mervyn King, Alan Prest and Brian Tew. The Group produced over 50 articles. Robin and Sargent edited a volume of the earlier papers in Contemporary Problems of Economic Policy in 1983’ (ibid.).
- [1] In retrospect, he came to think that the attempted reforms were misguided, to some extent anyway.
