Seven - The Young Professor

Summary

One of Lionel Robbins’s greatest achievements was what he did for LSE and its department of economics in the 1930s. In 1929 he could not know how much he would achieve in a decade but he started his new job with great resolution. His deep-rooted sense of duty was heightened by the unexpected good fortune which had given him the responsibility for the department – although at first he expected he would soon have a senior colleague. He told his father in February 1930 that he had been ‘working, or performing official obligations equivalent to work, up to a late hour every night…

Nothing much has happened to me outside the School for the simple reason that I am never anywhere else. There of course things are still fresh and interesting. I am conducting a very vigorous campaign for an increase of staff in the Economics Department. So far this has succeeded very well – indeed there can be no question of Beveridge’s willingness to spend. The spice of difficulty arises from the fact that I have very strong views as to the persons we should appoint and since we shall be advertizing the jobs there is a good deal of intrigue & manoeuvring of an innocent variety to be done. Apart from this my lectures take all my time. I live from hand to mouth this term and I am never sure at the beginning of the week whether I shall be competent to expound to my satisfaction the subject which is on my programme for the end of the week.…I shall be glad when the year is over.

Robbins had to take over Allyn Young’s theory teaching but without the help of Hugh Dalton, who was on leave of absence to serve in the Labour government. As colleagues in economics he had only the assistants Harold Batson and John Hicks, and Batson was away studying at the University of Heidelberg. Fortunately he could call upon George Schwartz, the secretary of the London and Cambridge Economic Service; Roy Douglas Allen, an assistant in Statistics; and Leonard Marsh, a research student who had obtained a First in the BSc(Econ) in 1928. Hicks had been an assistant for three years and had been lecturing on Trade and Industry. He thought of himself as a labour economist. He had also spent part of 1928 at the University of the Witwatersrand filling in for the recently deceased Professor R.A. Lehfeldt (Hamouda 1993, 6–11). Robbins immediately recommended his promotion to assistant lecturer, telling Beveridge on 15 July (Beveridge IIb28): ‘he has done a good deal of rather dull routine work very effectively and conscientiously. We are asking him to do a good deal more next year and…[promotion] might be a great encouragement.’ Although Hicks continued to lecture on trade and industry while he was writing The Theory of Wages (1932), Robbins set him to lecture on economic theory where he could put his mathematical training to use. According to Hicks (1973, 2–3), ‘The first fruits were a draft of what was to become the elasticity of substitution chapter in Theory of Wages, and a paper about Edgeworth and Marshall on the labour market, which appeared in the Economic Journal in June 1930. It was this latter which set me up as an economic theorist.’ The new lectures, on the Theory of Risk and Profits, also led to a journal article (1931). Lionel sent Hicks’s book with a strong recommendation for publication to Macmillan, which agreed to publish it but only after a report from a second reader (D.H. Robertson) after an unenthusiastic one from Keynes (Schuller 2008). In the 1930s Hicks made his name as an economic theorist, in both microeconomics and monetary theory. Some of his most important work was carried out with Allen. In 1929/30 Robbins assigned Allen a short series of lectures on Recent Theories of Costs and, with Marsh, to assist him in taking economic theory classes. A year later he assigned Allen and Hicks a new course for graduate students on Advanced Problems in Theoretical Economics.