James Mirrlees (1936—)

Huw Dixon

I Introduction

Sir James Mirrlees was born in 1936 at Minnigaff, just outside Newton Stewart in Galloway, south west Scotland. He developed an interest in mathematics which took him first to Edinburgh University in 1954 (direct entry into the second year) where he won a Napier Medal for his final year examinations. In 1957, at the age of 21, he went to take a second undergraduate degree in mathematics, this time at Trinity College, Cambridge. He entered directly into Part

II of the Tripos and became a Wrangler and subsequently went on to Part III. It was at this stage that Mirrlees developed an interest in economics, arising from discussions with fellow students. He was put in contact with Pierro Sraffa, the University Lecturer in Economics at Trinity College. Mirrlees later wrote: ‘[I]t was indeed economics I wanted to do, because I kept discussing it with economist friends, and they didn’t make sense to me; and because poverty in what were then called the underdeveloped countries, seemed to me what really mattered in the world, and that meant economics’ (Nobelprize.org 1996).

His formal studies in economics began when he took the Diploma in Economics: a one-year ‘crash course’ constituted from parts of the final year of the economics degree. His official supervisor was Richard Stone, but he also worked initially with David Champernowne and attended lectures and

H. Dixon (*)

Professor of Economics, Cardiff Business School, Cardiff University, UK 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_48

seminars given by the Cambridge luminaries of the day: Kahn, Kaldor, and Joan Robinson. Mirrlees was pointed in the direction of Frank Ramsey’s theory of optimal saving. Frank Hahn soon arrived and as Mirrlees wrote, ‘at some point in all this I had discovered Samuelson and mathematical economics’ (ibid.). As noted, he also discovered Ramsey’s theory of saving (Ramsey 1928). However, Kaldor needed a research assistant to help him out with the mathematics, and the result was the paper of Kaldor and Mirrlees A New Model of Economic Growth’ published in the Review of Economic Studies in 1962. He went on to complete his PhD in 1964 with the thesis title Optimum Planning for a Dynamic Economy, which included his subsequent article ‘Optimum Growth when Technology is Changing’ (Mirrlees 1967).

Mirrlees’s first stint at Cambridge ended in 1969 when he moved to Oxford at the age of 33 to become the first Edgeworth Professor of Economics based at the relatively new Nuffield College where he remained until 1995. This was a period of great productivity, during which he wrote many important papers both with colleagues and PhD students. He had a particularly close working relationship with Peter Diamond, with whom he collaborated several times, as well as Sir Nick Stern, Ian Little, and others. Whilst he had started supervising PhD students at Cambridge—one of his first was Sir Partha Dasgupta, who graduated in 1968—his list of doctoral students in these Oxford years is long and varied, including Sir John Vickers, Jesus Seade, Peter Neary, Jiang Wei Ying, Anthony Venables, Tim Besley, Gareth Myles, and many others. He was also co-editor of Econometrica over the period 1980-1984.

I had the pleasure and privilege myself of being Jim’s PhD student^[1] in the years 1982-1985. I had done a degree in philosophy and economics at Oxford prior to going to Nuffield and so always felt a little underprepared for working with the embodiment of mathematical rigour in economics. However, he was always genial and encouraging. My thesis topic of Edgeworthian Oligopoly was not his area of expertise. However, he gently helped me understand how I could express and analyse my disparate and disorganized ideas in terms of a formal mathematical model. Part of this is to choose carefully the propositions or theorems you prove: they should distil the essence of what you are trying to communicate. I remember, after some discussion on a particular issue, he said ‘now, that is a Theorem worth proving’, which meant that we had found (after a few alternatives) the exact way of expressing the key idea. Then there was the proof. Once you had a theorem to prove, the task became purely mathematical. Economic intu?ition might be a helpful guide, but in the end a proof is a mathematical procedure of moving symbols about. Once you had the proof there was also the issue of ‘elegance’: the proof was best concise and no longer than strictly necessary. Any elegance my proofs might have I owe entirely to Jim. Thirty years later, when involved in a proof, I often think back to those supervision meetings I had with Jim in his college room.

In 1995, Mirrlees moved back to Cambridge, as Professor of Political Economy and Fellow of Trinity, and had the pleasure of living in College for six years (his first wife Gill had died in 1993). In 1996, he was awarded the Nobel Prize in Economics, along with William Vickery. The Nobel citation was ‘for their fundamental contributions to the economic theory of incentives under asymmetric information’ and in Mirrlees’s case he had ‘Developed methods of analyzing the problems of incomplete, or asymmetrical, information. Specialized in work in optimal taxation’. Whilst his main theoretical work was over, his interests in the fields of taxation and growth in developing countries continued. Indeed, in many ways his role in the realm of practical policy was about to begin. He had been involved in advising the Pakistani government in the late 1960s whilst visiting the Pakistan Institute of Development. However, in later life, he was involved with the Institute of Fiscal Studies’ (IFS) Mirrlees Commission and advising the Scottish government.

In 2001, he married again, to Patricia. Lady Patricia Mirrlees had worked in Beijing over the period 1977-1987 on the magazine Chinese Literature and also in Macau at the University of East Asia and so had long-standing connections with China. When James Mirrlees retired from his Cambridge Chair in 2003, he took a part-time research position as ‘distinguished professor-at-large’ in the Chinese University of Hong Kong along with other time-to-time positions at the University of Macau, the University of Melbourne, and Peking University. As a Nobel Laureate, he was invited to give many varied lectures in this period, covering all kinds of topics. These included how one should use labour subsidies to reduce unemployment in Spain, how GDP and inequality were likely to grow in China, what sort of taxes there should be, the serious problems of derivatives creating moral hazard and economic crises, economic comparisons of India and China, the policy implications of non-rational behaviour, and why the Mediterranean economies should relinquish the euro. Much but not all of the content has remained unpublished.

In 2006, when asked by Lawrence Lau, then vice-chancellor of the Chinese University of Hong Kong, to become Master of a new institution, Morningside College, in the University, Mirrlees agreed (to his own surprise), because he was a strong believer in the value of small colleges in the

Oxford/Cambridge style. Morningside took its first students in 2010, and he became a full-time Professor in the University. The College acquired its building in 2011, with a Master’s Lodge, in which he and his wife currently live. The post is set to continue until the end of 2017. He intends to return to live in England when he eventually retires from Hong Kong.

[1] Or, to use the correct Oxford terminology, a DPhil student. PhD and DPhil are simply alternativeabbreviations of ‘Doctor of Philosophy’.