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William Beveridge’s “mock trial of economists”

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Abstract

The 1933 Mock Trial of Economists is occasionally noticed and then interpreted as a representation of popular discontent with the economists’ “crime” of “conspiracy to spread mental fog.” William Beveridge’s papers in the London School of Economics archives contain the written record of the performed composition and an unperformed frame for the Trial. Both are reproduced below. The performance singles out J. M. Keynes for his changing points of view. The unperformed frame provides evidence of Beveridge’s defense of diverse viewpoints in light of his worries about totalitarian repression. Long after he had left LSE, F. A. Hayek called attention to Beveridge’s worries about the fate of multiple viewpoints under socialism.

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Notes

  1. The review in the Times described it as such.

  2. “There was never a time when the advice of the economic expert was so often asked and so seldom followed as the present. Different explanations of this phenomenon are given by the economists and by the politicians who refuse to follow their advice. The quarrel has long simmered, and it came to a serio-comic head at the London School of Economics on Tuesday in a mock trial—not entirely a mockery—at which Sir William Beveridge, Sir Arthur Salter, Professor Gregory and Mr. Hubert Henderson were charged by Mr. Robert Boothby, M.P., with ‘conspiring to spread mental fog.’ Major Walter Elliot, anonymously but appropriately, presided over the court as judge.” “Economists on trial.” June 17, 1933.

  3. We give in parentheses, as page reference, the LSE top right-hand corner penciled page mark on the mss. We use bold italic emphasis to help with referencing the originals.

  4. This is worth noting since David Low himself participated in an LSE mock trial at which he was convicted and sentenced to life in the National Portrait Gallery (Low 1956, p. 295).

  5. In his letter to the Director of LSE on 1 February 1984, Adams tells how the cartoons came to be: “I was at the School from 1930 to 1934, and apart from contriving a ‘Second’ in BSc (Econ.), I spent a lot of time in drawing caricatures and sketches of everyone I could lay my pen on. Many of these appeared in the ‘Clare Market Review’; far more didn’t, but have surprisingly survived in my primitive filing system to this day. … Although many of the drawings are immature and/or very sketchy, the field I farmed was uncommonly fertile, its yield including, among the Academic Staff, Beveridge, Laski (particularly), Robbins, Hayek, Gregory, Finer, Dalton, Kaldor, Lees-Smith, Webster, Whale, Brogan, Hicks, Turin, Chorley, Plant, Eileen Power, Pickles, Beales and many others. Apart from a few sketches of the Administrative Staff there are of course plenty of my fellow-students, and some of these could perhaps be of interest to anyone who is still in touch, 50 years later. (They include a sketch of Krishna Menon, but regrettably I never drew Joe Kennedy or B. K. Nehru, though I played rugby and badminton with them respectively.)” Adams’s caricatures of Nicholas Kaldor and J. R. Hicks are reproduced in Levy and Peart (2017).

  6. Ernest J. P. Benn.; W W. Paine.; George Lambert. “Private and Public Spending an Untenable Analogy.” The Times, Oct 18, 1932; pg. 10; col. D. The identification was easy since there are direct quotations in the Oxbridge letter that matched exactly.

  7. Some of the interview is necessary to understand the reference; other parts help appreciate Beveridge’s research competence and his point of view. RADIO TIMES ‘WHO’S WHO’, March 11th 1932 Sir William Beveridge “Born in Bengal, 1879, in a house of which people said that whenever they came to a dinner party there they met a cobra on the veranda as they were leaving (Sir William says that as it was India, not prohibition America, the cobra was probably a real one). … Took variety of examinations and degrees at Oxford (Classics, Maths, ‘Great[s],’ and Law); then migrated to London to become for two years sub-warden of Toynbee Hall (where he first became interested in the Unemployment problem) … During the War invented a submarine game, called ‘Swish,’ and in his spare time helped to start the Ministry of Munitions and to invent in the Ministry of Food the rationing system which abolished food queues in the spring of 1918. In 1919 … becoming fourth Director of the London School of Economics and Political Science, which has grown amazingly under his care. The School … has provided Sir William with a family of some 3000 students. Though unmarried, is neither an archbishop nor a judge, so has not yet begun to advise married people as to how they should run all their affairs; prefers his own plan of giving as many married people as possible an opportunity, through the Family Form, of telling him what they know and so making it possible for any important question affecting family life to be dealt with on a basis of real knowledge, and not of imagination or prejudice. … [emphasis added] (22)” The sentence we emphasize needs to be put into the context of the argument that voluntary contraception precludes eugenic social engineering (Peart and Levy 2005; Levy and Peart 2017). Graham Wallas, cofounder of LSE and the great authority on Francis Place, was still alive when the interview was conducted.

  8. “Engineers were in the worst position of all during [the purges]. There was an anecdote current then: two old men met and one asked the other, ‘Well, how are things with you?’ The other replied, ‘Bad, my son has just been arrested.’ And the first man said, ‘Gosh-my son is an engineer too.’” (Brandenberger 2009, p. 153). We offer a general defense of anecdotal evidence in Peart and Levy 2005 and in the case of the Soviet economy in particular in Levy and Peart 2006 where, from the standard anecdotes, one recovers a public choice theory of central planning (Levy and Peart 2008).

  9. “Sentences had been prepared beforehand by nonjudicial authorities. ‘The vicious practice was condoned of having the NKVD prepare lists of persons whose cases were under jurisdiction of the Military Collegium and whose sentences were prepared in advance. Yezhov would send these lists to Stalin personally for his approval of the proposed punishment. ... He approved these lists.’” Conquest ([1990] 2008, p. 92). V. V. Ulrikh plays a significant role (with twenty references) in the Great Terror for events after the 1933 trial in which Beveridge points to his importance.

  10. Just how carefully Beveridge followed Soviet developments in his research is clear from the discussion of unemployment in his review of the Webbs’s book on the Soviet Union. “‘There is no unemployment in the land of the Soviets,’ wrote Trud, the union journal in October, 1930. In the same month payment of unemployment benefit, which even before then had been meagre in scale, was stopped completely and has not been resumed. The first thing to be said of this claim to have no unemployment, is that the claim would carry more conviction, if, instead of abolishing unemployment insurance, the Soviet Government had kept it on and were able to show that no benefits were being paid” (Beveridge 1936, p. 364). He was aware of something missing in much American textbook discussion of Soviet growth of the 1960s and 70s, the problem of unemployment being defined out of existence (Levy and Peart 2008, 2017).

References

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Acknowledgements

First and foremost, we are grateful to the rights holders, including the London School of Economics Archives and the daughters of A. R. “Pat” Adams, for permissions to reproduce. Without their generosity there would be no paper. Susan Howson told us about the Adams caricatures. An earlier version was presented at the 2011 meeting of the Summer Institute for the Preservation of the History of Economics where we benefited from the discussion. We are responsible for remaining mistakes, including those of transcription. Jane Perry helped to reduce those and provided valuable editorial assistance. We thank Peter Boettke for his encouragement to think of the Mock Trial as the first “rap video.” Finally we thank the RAE reader for suggesting we explain the link to F. A. Hayek.

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Levy, D.M., Peart, S.J. William Beveridge’s “mock trial of economists”. Rev Austrian Econ 34, 221–252 (2021). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11138-019-00479-4

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