Abstract
Ideology is often contrasted with pragmatism. But of course no policy was ever made, however ‘pragmatic’, without ideology, that is a set of informing ideas on causes and effects. For example, the policies of the Heath/Wilson/Callaghan Governments of the 1970s were all based on the ideology of corporatism, a corpus of thinking that others in this volume have defined and criticised. Yet proponents of these policies have often defended themselves as being more pragmatic and less ideological than their Thatcherite successors in the 1980s.
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Notes and References
See, for example, M. Friedman, ‘The Role of Monetary Policy’, American Economic Review, 58 (1968): 1–17.
E.g., J. M. Buchanan and G. Tullock, The Calculus of Consent (Ann Arbor, Michigan, 1962).
W. Baumol, ‘Contestable Markets: An Uprising in the Theory of Industrial Structure’, American Economic Review, 72 (1982): 1–15.
For an early example of this mode of thought see R. E. Lucas, Jr., ‘Some International Evidence on Output in Inflation Trade-Offs’, American Economic Review, 68 (1973): 326–34.
P. Minford and P. Ashton, ‘The Poverty Trap and the Laffer Curve -What Can the GHS Tell Us?’, CEPR discussion paper, 275 (1988).
C. V. Brown, E. J. Levin, P. J. Rosa, R. J. Raffell and D. T. Ulph, Taxation and Family Labour Supply: Final Report of H.M. Treasury Project (London, 1987).
D. Maki and A. Spindler, ‘The Effect of Unemployment Compensation on the Rate of Unemployment in Great Britain’, Oxford Economic Papers, 27 (1975): 440–54.
D. Benjamin and L. Kochin, ‘Searching for an Explanation of Unemployment in Interwar Britain’, Journal of Political Economy, 87 (1979): 441–70.
Published eventually in articles and in P. Minford, D. Davies, M. Peel and A. Sprague, Unemployment: Cause and Cure (London, 1983).
R. Layard and S. Nickell, ‘The Causes of British Unemployment’, National Institute Economic Review, 3 (February 1985): 62–85.
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© 1990 Patrick Minford
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Minford, P. (1990). Ideology and Pragmatism in Economic Thatcherism. In: Clark, J.C.D. (eds) Ideas and Politics in Modern Britain. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-20686-5_11
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-20686-5_11
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