High Theory, 1924 to 1939: Harrod, Meade, and the Cross-Fertilisation of Ideas in Oxford

Abstract

In his review of Shackle’s The Years of High Theory, Harrod focused upon the problematic nature of the development of economic thought between the publication of Keynes’s A Tract on Monetary Reform (1923) and his own ‘Essay in Dynamic Theory’ (1939a). The issues Harrod raised in his review included problems of priority, multiple discovery and utilisation of economic concepts and tools, in addition to the ‘insularity’ of some Cambridge economists as against the ‘open-mindedness’ of Oxford economists and the cross-fertilisation of ideas between them and other Cambridge and London-based economists over the period. According to Harrod, ‘there were many unresolved difficulties’ and ‘unsettled questions’ regarding: (a) the development of the theory of imperfect competition and its relation to the marginal revenue concept discovered by Harrod; (b) the link between these theoretical developments, Keynes’s early ideas, and Harrod’s own approach to them; (c) the utilisation by Harrod of the ‘indifference curve’ approach discovered by Edgeworth, even before Hicks and Allen; and finally (d) the insularity of Cambridge economists as against the openmindedness of their Oxford counterparts, a point which Harrod had originally made in his 1967 review essay on the Wicksell Memorial Lectures volume, in which he cited Edgeworth as an example of an Oxford economist with an in-depth knowledge of the works of foreign economists, and one who was also engaged in extensive correspondence with them; and this, in contrast to the ostensible insularity of Marshall and other Cambridge economists.¹