13 - Money and Inflation

Summary

My own scientific work, so far as the English end of it was concerned, lay in the field of monetary economics. My interests at Chicago had been in international trade theory, but the L.S.E. was well stocked, body-wise if not brain-wise, with teachers in that area, whereas no-one in Britain seemed aware of the ‘monetarist counter revolution’ that had been going on in the United States and in the scientifically active academic world generally and it seemed important to me that our own students should be instructed in post-General Theory developments and controversies.

1974 Memoir IV, 31

Hence the centrality to Harry of his MSc macroeconomics lectures at the School, eventually published as Macroeconomics and Monetary Theory (MMT, 1971d). However, there were a number of other strands in Harry's involvement in macroeconomics after 1966. As a result of his earlier concerns with money and economic growth and British worries about competition in banking, he got involved in discussions of efficiency in banking where he had a major effect on opinion. He continued to concern himself with the problem of inflation. He also tried to place Friedman's monetarism in some longer term perspective. Finally, under the stimulus of contemporary problems and theorising among his Chicago colleagues and students, he redeveloped a major interest in money and the balance of payments where he had made a pioneering contribution, “Towards a General Theory of the Balance of Payments,” in the 1950s.

After 1966 Harry's thinking was in transition.