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Published by EH.NET (August 2000) 
 
Alec Cairncross, _Living with the Century_. Fife: iynx, 1998. xvi + 320 pp. 
0 (cloth), ISBN: 0-9535413-0-4. 
 
Reviewed for EH.NET by Neil Rollings, Institute of Economic Research, 
Hitotsubashi University, and Department of Economic and Social History, 
University of Glasgow. <[log in to unmask] and 
[log in to unmask]> 
 
 
Before I start this review I should make it clear that Sir Alec Cairncross, 
who died just after this book, his memoirs, had gone to press, has played 
an important role in my academic career. Not only was he the Chancellor of 
the University of Glasgow when I was appointed, but he was one of my 
referees and I had also worked for him in preparing _The Robert Hall 
Diaries 1947-53_. After my appointment he always found time when he visited 
Glasgow to see me and to see how my work was progressing. I am sure that I 
am not the only young academic who benefited from his generous support and 
encouragement. 
 
There is a regular stream of memoirs and autobiographies from retired 
politicians looking to set the record straight and, for the more famous, to 
earn some easy money at the same time. By contrast, few economists have 
written their memoirs. So one could well ask why Sir Alec Cairncross 
decided to write his. The reason, I think, is that Cairncross was not a 
typical economist. His main impact was not on the intellectual development 
of economics but through its application, in particular through his 
influence on policy-making in Britain. For many years he was at the center 
of government economic policy formulation. In January 1940 and only 
twenty-eight years old, he entered government service, first in the 
Economic Section, a small group of professional economists at the center of 
government, (for eighteen months), then briefly the Board of Trade, before 
spending the rest of the war working on planning in the Ministry of 
Aircraft Production. From 1946 to 1949 he was Economic Adviser to the Board 
of Trade and he finally returned to government service from 1961 to 1969 as 
Chief Economic Adviser to the Government and then as the first Head of the 
Government Economic Service. It is significant, therefore, that the 
foreword to this book is written by Roy Jenkins, a politician, and not by a 
fellow economist. 
 
The chapters that cover this lengthy government service are perhaps the 
least interesting to those that know Cairncross's previous publications 
because he has written widely on many of these experiences, for example in 
A. Cairncross and N. Watts, _The Economic Section 1939-61_ (1989), 
_Planning in Wartime_ (1991), _Years of Recovery: British Economic Policy 
1945-51_ (1985), and _Managing the British Economy in the 1960s_ (1996). 
Indeed, for the period when he was Chief Economic Adviser and the Head of 
the Government Economic Service his diary has also been published. 
 
It is elsewhere in the book that one finds more interesting material. The 
sheer variety of his life and his activities is perhaps the most striking 
feature of the memoirs. As a postgraduate he was in Cambridge in the 1930s 
and was one of the founders of the _Review of Economic Studies_ (later he 
was to help establish the _Scottish Journal of Political Economy_). In 1944 
he published _Introduction to Economics_, which was one of the first 
textbooks of modern economics and was to go through six editions, the last 
being in 1982. And in the 1950s, his newly formed department at Glasgow was 
one of the earliest in Britain to offer courses to business managers. In 
addition, he was a member of a number of important committees in Britain, 
most notably the Radcliffe Committee on the Working of the Monetary System; 
wrote a highly influential report on regional growth point policy; and in 
1969 became a master of an Oxford college. Nor were his activities 
restricted to Britain. Immediately after the war he was in Germany dealing 
with reparations, in 1950 he spent a year as Director of the Economics 
Division of the OEEC and for eighteen months from 1955 was the founding 
Director of the Economic Development Institute of the World Bank. Amongst 
his many activities in retirement were a number of trips to China. 
 
What is significant about this is that he was a generalist, dealing with 
micro and macro issues, domestic and international affairs. He was a firm 
believer in the power of human reason: economics was a way of thinking, 
whereby clear, rational thought could provide the solution to a problem. 
Inevitably, this meant he often had no knowledge of a particular subject 
prior to being asked to consider it. It is hard to imagine that anyone now 
appointed to a position equivalent to the Director of the World Bank's 
Economic Development Institute would know little about developing countries 
and the development literature, as was the case with Cairncross. In the 
book he emphasizes how the twentieth century has been the century of the 
economist and of economics, but also how much, as a result, economics has 
developed over that time, not just intellectually but also in terms of the 
number of practitioners and the extent of specialization. It is highly 
unlikely that any young economist today would be able in the next century 
to lead such a varied life and work in so many different areas of 
economics. Nevertheless, we can all learn from Cairncross's belief that 'to 
rest content with the familiar is a way of remaining underdeveloped' (p. 
292). 
 
 
Neil Rollings has just published, with Astrid Ringe, "Responding to 
Relative Decline: The Creation of the National Economic Development 
Council," _Economic History Review_ (May 2000). "Reluctant Europeans?: The 
Federation of British Industries and European Integration, 1945-63," 
written with Alan McKinlay and Helen Mercer, will appear in _Business 
History_ in October 2000. 
 
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