I let the commotion around me these days subside a bit before speaking to you from the bottom of my heart. I have just been given far too great an honour [The Nobel Prize for Literature], one I neither sought nor solicited. But when I heard the news, my first thought, after my mother, was of you. Without you, without the affectionate hand you extended to the small poor child that I was, without your teaching, and your example, none of all this would have happened. I don’t make too much of this sort of honour. But at least it gives me an opportunity to tell you what you have been and still are for me, and to assure you that your efforts, your work, and the generous heart you put into it still live in one of your little schoolboys who, despite the years, has never stopped being your grateful pupil. I embrace you with all my heart.
Albert Camus
From Louis Germain
Algiers, this 30th of April 1959
My dear child,
I have received, addressed in your handwriting, the book Camus that its author Monsieur J.-CI. Brisville was kind enough to inscribe to me.
I do not know how to express the delight you gave me with your gracious act nor how to thank you for it. If it were possible, I would give a great hug to the big boy you have become who for me will always be ‘my little Camus’.
I have not yet read this work, other than the first few pages. Who is Camus? I have the impression that those who try to penetrate your nature do not quite succeed. You have always shown an instinctive reticence about revealing your nature, your feelings. You succeed all the more for being unaffected, direct. And good on top of that! I got these impressions of you in class. The pedagogue who does his job conscientiously overlooks no opportunity to know his pupils, his children, and these occur all the time. An answer, a gesture, a stance are amply revealing. So I think I well know the nice little fellow you were, and very often the child contains the seed of the man he will become. Your pleasure at being in school burst out all over. Your face showed optimism. And I never suspected the actual situation of your family from studying you. I only had a glimpse when your mother came to see me about your being listed among the candidates for the scholarship. Anyway, that happened when you were about to leave me. But until then you seemed to me to be in the same position as your classmates. You always had what you needed. Like your brother, you were nicely dressed. I don’t think I can find a greater compliment to your mother.
To return to Monsieur Brisville’s book, it is amply illustrated. It was very moving to know, from his photograph, your poor papa whom I have always considered ‘my comrade’. Monsieur Brisville was kind enough to quote me: I will thank him for it.
I saw the ever-lengthening list of works that are about you or speak of you. And it gives me very great satisfaction to see that your fame (this is the exact truth) has not gone to your head. You have remained Camus: bravo.
I have followed with interest the many vicissitudes of the play you adapted and also staged: The Possessed. I love you too much not to wish you the greatest success: it is what you deserve. What’s more, Malraux wants to provide you with a theatre. But … can you manage all these various activities? I fear that you misuse your talents. And, permit your old friend to point out, you have a nice wife and two children who need their husband and papa. On this subject, I am going to tell you what the head of our training college used to tell us now and then. He was very hard on us, which kept us from seeing, from feeling, that he really loved us. ‘Nature keeps a great book in which she scrupulously records every one of the excesses we commit.’ I must say that this wise advice has often restrained me when I was about to disregard it. So listen, try to leave a blank on the page reserved for you in nature’s Great Book.
Andrée reminds me that we saw and heard you on a literary programme on television, a programme about The Possessed. It was moving to see you answer the questions that were asked. And I could not keep myself from making the malicious observation that you well knew I would, after all, see and hear you. That makes up a bit for your absence from Algiers. We haven’t seen you for quite a while …
Before closing, I want to tell you how troubled I am, as a secular teacher, by the menacing plots aimed at our schools. I believe that throughout my career I have respected what is most sacred in a child: the right to seek out his own truth. I loved you all and I believe I did my best not to show my opinions and thus to influence your young minds. When it was a matter of God (it was in the curriculum), I said some believed, others did not. And in the fullness of his rights, each did as he pleased. Similarly, on the subject of religion, I limited myself to listing the ones that existed, to which those who so desired belonged. To be accurate, I added that there were people who practised no religion. I am well aware this does not please those who would like to make teachers fellow travellers for religion and, more precisely, for the Catholic religion. At the training college of Algiers (it was then at the parc de Galland) my father, like his classmates, was required to go to Mass and take Communion every Sunday. One day, exasperated by this requirement, he put the ‘consecrated’ host in a prayer-book and closed it! The head of the school was informed of this and did not hesitate to expel my father. That is what the promoters of the ‘Free school’1 (free … to think as they do) want. With the current membership of the Chamber of Deputies, I fear this plot may succeed. Le Canard Enchâiné2 reported that in one department a hundred secular schools function with a crucifix hanging on the wall. I see in that an abominable attack on the children’s minds. What may it come to in time? These thoughts make me very sad.
My dear child, I am coming to the end of my 4th page: I’m taking advantage of your time and I beg you to forgive me. All goes well here. Christian, my son-in-law, starts his 27th month in service tomorrow!
Know that, even when I do not write, I often think of all of you.
Madame Germain and I warmly embrace all four of you.
Affectionately.
Louis Germain
I remember the time you came to visit our class with your fellow communicants. You were obviously proud of the suit you were wearing and the feast day you were observing. Honestly, I was happy for your pleasure, believing that if you were making your Communion it was because you wanted to. So …
Is the top tail of wealth a set of fixed individuals or is there substantial turnover? We estimate upper-tail wealth dynamics during the Gilded Age and beyond, a time of rapid wealth accumulation and concentration in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Using various wealth proxies and data tracking tens of millions of individuals, we find that most extremely wealthy individuals drop out of the top tail within their lifetimes. Yet, elite wealth still matters. We find a non-linear association between grandparental wealth and being in the top 1%, such that having a rich grandparent exponentially increases the likelihood of reaching the top 1%. Still, over 90% of the grandchildren of top 1% wealth grandfathers did not achieve that level.
The case for clinical trial abundance
A supply-side reform agenda for one of our most urgent problems
I’m often coming across things, often small sometimes large where it is pretty obvious that large gains could be made by not doing something that everyone knows you have to do even though it makes no sense. And clinical trials are one such. Some need to be painstaking and expensive. But take the example where a proven drug in one field is tested for efficacy somewhere else. Well our experience using it in its established indication means we know a lot about how to administer it safely. That means clinical trials can be greatly streamlined or in fact replaced by routine clinical experimentation.
Recall recently the claim that Ivermectin was useful in treating COVID. It seems that it wasn’t. But we knew how to use it safely, so if folks wanted to be treated with it, we could have turned it into a trial and worked out pretty definitively whether it was a useful treatment in a few months. Instead, we decided to turn it into a culture war. Anyway, the point is more general than that example. Here’s Willy Chertman, M.D. and interesting substacker Ruxandra Tesloianu on the point.
In 2014, the first SGLT2 inhibitor, dapagliflozin, was approved for patients with Type II diabetes for the control of blood glucose levels. Since then, the list of indications for this class of molecules has expanded to include kidney disease (2021) and heart failure (2020) in non-diabetics, both important sources of morbidity and mortality. Despite being an already developed drug with safety data, these repurposings took seven and six years, respectively.
As in the case of dapaglifozin, so in many others. Even after a drug is discovered, its development faces many challenges — particularly the practical hurdles of conducting clinical trials. These studies are not only expensive, constituting an appreciable fraction of drug development costs,1 but also difficult to execute. They often stretch for years, struggling to find and retain enough participants. They frequently fail to reach completion. There is also an invisible cost — promising studies never launch because researchers or companies are deterred by these practical barriers. That means many medical questions remain unanswered not because of scientific limitations, but due to the logistics and costs of running trials. Because randomized controlled trials (RCTs) play a key role in the drug development pipeline and help generate high-quality evidence in other contexts, making RCTs cheaper, faster, and easier to carry out would have large spillover benefits for biomedical innovation and healthcare resource allocation.2
Some clinical trials are unavoidably expensive and difficult: for example, trials with new biologics have to be manufactured in small batches, administered with physician supervision to watch for unknown adverse events, and involve collection and analysis of many biological samples per patient. But many trials need not be expensive or difficult. When they involve treatments that are routinely administered, they should be integrated into routine clinical care as much as possible.
The need to make drug development more efficient has become increasingly pressing. US healthcare spending growth is predicted to reach nearly 20% of GDP by 2032 and exceed GDP growth itself for structural reasons, like an aging society. …
We live in an era of converging biotech and AI innovations. Our abilities to read (via sequencing), engineer (using tools like CRISPR/Cas9) and analyze biology (with AI) have all reached important milestones. If these innovations are able to accelerate preclinical R&D, RCTs will become an even more critical bottleneck in bringing new treatments to patients. Without speeding up and reducing the costs of RCTs, breakthrough scientific discoveries risk becoming backlogged in laboratories and testing phases while patients wait longer than necessary for treatment. This potential bottleneck has not gone unnoticed by leaders in AI, including the CEO of Anthropic, Dario Amodei.3
We have several reasons to be optimistic about our ability to cut clinical trial costs and timelines. One proof-of-concept is the RECOVERY trial, which cost about 1/80th of a traditional RCT and likely saved hundreds of thousands of lives by demonstrating the efficacy of steroids for COVID-19. RECOVERY showed the enormous cost and time savings possible if trials are kept tightly focused on important questions and trial enrollment/organization is made as easy as possible. We can also look at historic examples of large trials (e.g., the polio vaccine field trials) that ran on time and answered important questions, by avoiding cumbersome and unnecessary administrative delays. More abstractly, the vast majority of patients are never enrolled in trials, implying a large pool of patients that could theoretically be enrolled in trials.4
Many stakeholders agree on the urgency of the problem, often framed as clinical trial modernization. These include high-level regulators like FDA Commissioner Robert Califf and former Deputy Commissioner Janet Woodcock, academic groups like Duke Margolis, pharmaceutical executives, and even longtime industry critics like Vinay Prasad.5 Reducing the cost and difficulty of generating high-quality medical evidence is a rare area where most experts agree on the goals.
Despite this shared concern, substantive policy change is lacking …
Inside the mind of the billionaire at the heart of American power.
Quinn Slobodian is an historian of neoliberalism. I recommend his books Crack-Up Capitalism: Market Radicals and the Dream of a World Without Democracy, and Globalists: The End of Empire and the Birth of Neoliberalism. Here he is on Musk. A reasonable set of conjectures so long as you keep in mind they are mostly that — conjectures. He also takes some cheap shots suggesting that Peter Thiel is a hypocrite for having libertarian leanings while his firm Palantr wins contracts from government. Whatever you think of him Thiel believes that the US should have security and defence forces. It’s a pity he takes the cheap shot when it’s so unnecessary. It’s already pretty clear that Trump 2.0 will be crony capitalism central.
Elon Musk is a shapeshifter. One moment he speaks in gentle and almost disarmingly naive terms about the need to live with curiosity and compassion, and gets lost in the details of orbits and thrusters. In the next he stokes racist anger through inflammatory posts, recently branding a member of the UK government a “rape genocide apologist”. He is drawn to goth aesthetics (see the Elvish Fraktur typeface of his Maga hat) yet displays none of the capacity for introspection required to truly contemplate the void. Too hyperactive to mope, Musk’s attention skitters along the staccato of his social media feed. In the autumn he zigged towards Maga and Mar-a-Lago. In the winter, he zagged into the bramble of British and German politics. What happens when the world’s richest man becomes the world’s most high-profile troll?
“Only AfD can save Germany,” Musk wrote on X three days before Christmas, highlighting another user’s post about Germans “getting killed and raped by migrants”. Since New Year’s Eve he has blitzed his more than 200 million followers with dozens of images, clips and exhortations about the groomer gang scandal in northern England. A public tragedy and the subject of years-long inquiries, the topic has been of special focus for the far right because of the prominence of non-white men among the culprits. In 2019, the Christchurch shooter name-checked the central site of the abuse when he painted the words “for Rotherham” on one of the cartridges he used to kill 51 people in a New Zealand mosque.
Despite Keir Starmer’s personal involvement in prosecuting related crimes, Musk has taken special aim at the British Prime Minister. “Starmer must go,” he posted on 5 January. A few days later, the Financial Times revealed Musk is actively investigating ways for Starmer to be replaced before his term is over. A close adviser of the new US president scheming to remove the head of state of one of America’s closest allies feels like uncharted territory. When Donald Trump assumes office on 20 January, Musk and his nocturnal online impulses will come even closer to the levers of power. Trying to understand the kaleidoscopic rules of the game Musk is playing has therefore become something like a civic duty. If we squint through the shitposting and chaos, he seems driven by what we could see as five core propositions.
The first is that the state serves makers. Musk has no compunction about working with the government, having never been a doctrinaire libertarian. He sees government as a positive partner insofar as it coordinates its efforts to the solutions of engineers.
The second proposition is that all wicked problems have a technological fix. Nothing from climate change to social inequality requires mediation through public consultative processes. Everything has a design remedy. On these first two propositions, Musk is in the world of his Silicon Valley comrades and their embrace of what tech critic Evgeny Morozov dubbed “solutionism”. …
The rhetorical aversion of the many self-proclaimed libertarians in this cohort to reliance on state contracts has been either overcome or revealed as flimsy hypocrisy. Thiel’s Palantir has a half-billion-dollar contract with the US military. … Before the 2024 election, Trump compared crypto to the “steel industry of 100 years ago” and promised to construct “the crypto capital of the planet and bitcoin superpower of the world”. The centrality of Silicon Valley in Trump’s coalition lends not only the legitimacy of a continual rising stock market – resting disproportionately on a handful of very large tech companies – but also a world-view that points to an innovative future rather than backwards to an idealised past.
Musk’s third conviction is that online politics have killed old politics. X is more valuable than the New York Times; Tesla is worth all other car companies combined. In 2016, Trump staged a hostile takeover of the GOP. His candidacy was opposed by the entire Republican establishment. Yet he showed the power of breaking taboos and leveraging outrage, not least through the new immediacy of social media platforms. Musk did not orient himself right away to the new paradigm, opposing Trump in 2016. His political conversion to the right was accelerated by twin events in 2020: first, the measures to contain the spread of Covid-19 which slowed the operation of his car manufacturing plants, and second, the gender transition of his child, Vivian. Since 2020, Musk has become ever-more fixated on the “woke mind virus”, claiming at one point it had “killed” his (very much living) child. …
The AfD, target of Musk’s most recent lovebombing, has neo-Nazis in its ranks. But it is not inaccurately described by its current co-leader Alice Weidel as a “conservative libertarian” party, matching nativist promises of hard borders with low taxes, slashed regulations and carbon-driven growth. When Musk spoke with Weidel to an audience of several hundred thousand on Twitter on 9 January, she said that the AfD was trying to “free people of the state”. “We want freedom of speech,” she said, and “freedom of wealth”. The targets were familiar from the Thatcher and Reagan years: the bureaucrats, the welfare recipients and the regulators.
Musk’s fifth proposal is perhaps the strangest: the idea that the deep future guides present action. As fanciful as it might sound, his discussion of the need for humans to be “a multi-planetary civilisation” offers some explanation for why he is willing to put himself in the centre of the story.
We are in a different realm than the traditional model of billionaires enriching themselves through alliances with politicians just to secure federal contracts or fight for tax breaks, operating in the shadows through Pacs (political action committees) and funding ecosystems of opinion-creation in the style of the ultra-libertarian carbon baron, Charles Koch. Granting some truth to Musk’s continual vilification of George Soros and Bill Gates, this is also how they have operated: funding civil society in the form of research, advocacy and journalism.
Musk’s willingness to make himself the main character suggests that he realises the power of himself as a brand. In the same way that Trump has become synonymous with the GOP, Musk’s cult of personality is inseparable from the valuation of his companies. Any need for validation would be confirmed by looking at the vertical rise in stock prices of the companies that he helped found or direct over the last few years.
Musk’s goal is not to operate behind the scenes. Even after the inevitable falling out between himself and Trump, he will be a gadfly with half a trillion reasons to keep his name in the headlines. Nor (citizenship requirement notwithstanding) does he aim to become president himself one day. Why tolerate such a minor role? From buying Twitter to fathering a dozen children to getting Trump elected, he routinely explains his decisions as made for the “future of civilisation”.
Rather than a new Koch or Soros, his aspiration is to be more like the Hari Seldon character from Isaac Asimov’s Foundation series, which is among Musk’s “all-time best” novels. In Asimov’s story, the mathematician Seldon predicts humanity’s future and intervenes as an enlightened avatar. He is the saviour of not just the party or the society, but civilisation itself. This level of validation is perhaps the only thing that will satisfy Musk’s ego after having achieved all other man-made goals.
We have to entertain the idea that, for Musk, state capture is not an end in itself, but only a prelude to state exit – starting a new polity either on Earth (trialled by the incorporation of a new company town in Starbase, Texas) or on Mars. But how seriously should we take this long-termism? Would it not be more accurate to see Musk as the consummate short-termist? A good historian finds the personality of their subject not in the motivation of a single ego, however powerful, but in the context out of which they rose. What if we asked not what worlds Musk is making but what worlds made Musk? …
With his hooks deep in the new administration, Musk is taking aim at some of the world’s other leaders, from Justin Trudeau to Olaf Scholz. It’s nihilistic, reckless and – perfect for a gamer used to satisfying short-term impulses – delivers endorphin rushes without regard to real-world effects. Safe from his provocations so far are the countries closest to his own interests, namely China, where he may still play a moderating influence on the Trump administration. The rest of the world remains what developers call a sandbox game, open for free play and exploration.
Perhaps this is closer to who Musk is in reality: not Hari Seldon the “psychohistorian” able to read the future from his library, but the teenage boy in the dorm room talking about aliens and The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, pumping his fist when he kills another pixelated demon. The world continues to reward him. Why would he stop?
One of the sillier things about writing op eds is that you pigeonhole them into the meme du jour. In this case Stephen Eide makes the interesting argument for re-paternalising mental health, though he stresses much of it should be family support. He does so by arguing that it could be an area where Donald Trump changes the script. Well he does mention one straw in the wind regarding his previous term, but I won’t hold my breath. His fundamental point is an interesting one though which is that the mentally ill have been cruelly neglected by the deinstitutionalisers on the left and the small-government folks on the right.
That crisis consists of the four million or so adults with untreated serious mental illnesses, such as bipolar disorder and schizophrenia. The result is homelessness, mass shootings, random subway violence, and incarceration, especially in Democratic areas that shifted sharply to the Right in the 2024 election. Trump can disrupt and realign the status quo — provided he ignores small-government zealots in his own camp.
The mental-health crisis stems more from partisan agreement than disagreement. In his hit 2023 book, The Best Minds, author Jonathan Rosen noted that “Left and Right often met at the gates of the asylum.” He was referring to how, back in the 1960s, the deinstitutionalisation of the mentally ill was a joint effort of fiscal conservatives and progressive civil libertarians: the former shuttering mental hospitals in the name of austerity, the latter for autonomy’s sake. In the six decades that followed, the number of psychiatric beds nationally dropped to 35,000 down from 560,000.
That coalition still controls mental health-policy six decades later. Reformers and relatives of the seriously mentally ill have long called for allowing Medicaid, America’s public-insurance programme for the poor, to fund care in specialised psychiatric hospitals. Yet the move has long been opposed by a coalition of Republicans, who believe it would cost too much money, and Democrats, who worry that it would risk mass re-institutionalisation.
Enter Trump, whose first term mental-health agenda was underrated. Trump appointed a dedicated change agent as his mental health czar and weakened (if not removed) restrictions on the use of Medicaid for psychiatric hospitalisation. A second Trump administration raises hopes of further progress. …
Sometimes things have to get worse before they can get better. As blue-city voters complain and the data show, public transit and street conditions have recently worsened. In last November’s election cycle, some high profile progressive prosecutors were voted out of office, and Californians passed Proposition 36, which strengthened penalties for low-level crimes. The proposition’s nearly 40-point pass margin signals that the politics of law and order are almost as popular in California as Donald Trump is in West Virginia.
Treating serious mental disorders and fighting crime are different government functions. But the reality is that a Democrat who votes to crack down against retail theft will likely also support a more paternalistic turn in mental health. Paternalism needn’t, and almost surely won’t, mean the return of the asylum order. … Community-based mental health will remain central, but nestled within that system must be a more robust stock of psych beds than is currently available to the seriously mentally ill Americans. …
Caring for an adult schizophrenic child entails interminable fights over taking meds and not taking street drugs. They’re prone to paranoia but also to trusting too much, making them easy prey for malefactors such as drug dealers and financial scammers. They can be irrationally risk-prone or overcautious to an extreme. The strange hours, hoarding, atrocious hygiene habits, and property damage: mental illness overwhelms family caregivers. It also sometimes makes them victims of violence. One 2016 study estimated that the seriously mentally ill commit more than 1,000 family homicides each year. Most matricides and patricides involve serious mental illness.
To promote reform, we should frame untreated serious mental illness as more of a family problem than an urban one. Thinking about how government may best support family caregivers is the most coherent way to build an effective mental-health system, one that anticipates crises before tragedy strikes.
Perhaps that framing may also build more support among Republicans, the party of family values. In terms of the policy, a realignment on mental health should be structured around more spending on services for the seriously mentally ill and more paternalism. New York and other major cities would benefit. But they would be far from the only beneficiaries.
Stepwells are water reservoirs found in various parts of India that were created by digging deep down into the earth and making use of natural aquifers to trap rainwater and groundwater. Most of them have several levels going deep into the soil (typically at least 25 meters or 82 feet) and are reached through a series of stone steps. For several centuries, stepwells provided people with a perennial water source, particularly in areas prone to arid climates and drought, such as Delhi and Rajasthan — until they fell out of use under British rule in the 19th century.
Renowned conservation architect and former principal director of the Architectural Heritage Division at the Indian National Trust for Art and Cultural Heritage (INTACH), Divay Gupta, says that ancient stepwells were built with the reverence reserved for temples and palaces — indicating their role in providing precious water to the people — and had magnificent architecture, with flourishes like delicate arches and intricately carved statues in wall niches along the steps.
“They were secular in their function, fulfilling the civic and socioeconomic needs of the local communities which built them,” he explains. So, apart from being reliable water sources, stepwells played other social functions: The shaded pavilions along their steps offered places for weary travelers to rest, and they served as social hubs for women to meet and chat with friends in the midst of their busy days.
“It turns out NFTs of tennis balls that sold for $3 million aren't worth much after all and I just died of not-surprise”
From PC Gamer
Back in 2022, the Tennis Australia's forward-thinking management released 6,776 images of tennis balls as digital NFTs. Each one sold for 0.067 in the ethereum cryptocurrency, about $278 AUD at the time. Those same NFTs are now reportedly trading for as little as 0.003ETH or $15 AUD on OpenSea, the self-described "world’s first and largest digital marketplace for crypto collectibles and non-fungible tokens (NFTs)". Ouch.
To add a little detail and context, the NFTs were linked to 19cm by 19cm plots on the courts at the Australian Open in Melbourne. At the time, Tennis Australia reportedly promised to update the metadata on the NFTs whenever a winning shot during a match landed on a given the plot.
What's more, Tennis Australia pitched the whole thing as being akin to an airline frequent flyers program, offering ground passes for finals weeks for NFT owners, so-called behind the scenes access along with tickets to matches the following year if their NFT court plot was linked to a match point. Oh, and a Discord channel for NFT owners was set up.
In 2023, Tennis Australia released a further 2,545 NFTs … At the time, Ridley Plummer, senior manager of metaverse, NFTs, web3 and cryptocurrency at Tennis Australia, said the organization was commited to NFTs for the long term.
“We shouldn’t just put down our tools and walk away because the market’s having its challenges. There’s obviously a ton of external factors that come into play when you’re exploring a new technology like web3 and NFTs, and when you’re an innovative company like Tennis Australia and the AO there’s obviously challenges and and rewards that come with that as well,” Plummer said.
In 2024, it's thought Tennis Australia did not issue any further NFTs, though existing owners were given ground passes. For this year's tournament, currently running in Melbourne, it seems that the Australian Open isn't mentioning the NFT scheme at all or offering ground passes. The Guardian says that the Discord server has been shut down, the associated websites are "dormant" and that Tennis Australia isn't responding to "multiple requests for comment."
Neoclassical economics was in many ways a giant detour on which economics continues to travel. Keynes had its measure from the get-go, from his accusation that Jan Tinbergen’s multi-sector general-equilibrium was built on assumptions that were ‘black magic’ to this observation about J. R. Hicks’s foundational volume Value and Capital.
I have now finished reading Hicks's book. I don't think I have ever read a book by an obviously clever man, so free from points open to specific criticisms, which was so utterly empty. I did not, at the end, feel a penny the wiser about anything. He seemed able to decant the most interesting subjects of all their contents, and to produce something so thin and innocuous as to be almost meaningless. Yet, in many ways, it is well written and clear, clever and intelligent, and without mistakes. But about nothing whatever. Simple things are made to appear very difficult and complicated, and the emptiest platitudes paraded as generalisations of vast import. A most queer book.
Over to the bio of Pigou
To “Really Do a Little Good”: A Redemptive Conclusion
THERE IS A PHOTOGRAPH of an elderly Pigou walking in the King’s grounds with another aging fellow, Frank Adcock, a retired professor, fittingly, of Ancient History. Pigou and Adcock had been fellows together at King’s for more than forty years.1 Though not particularly close in their youth, in old age, the pair had taken to perambulating the grounds. Captured in mid-stride on a steely day in March 1954, the two of them were strolling through the college toward the River Cam. Pigou had donned a battered tweed jacket, a scarf, and worn woolen mittens, one of which was wrapped around the handle of a cane. His frame less straight than in his youth, Pigou had about him the softened lines of age. He had become one of the “dark shades” of the “museum of the antique” whom he had playfully figured over fifty years before.
Even in his retirement, Pigou stayed ensconced in Marshall’s chair. This was not the Chair of Political Economy, but a physical armchair given to him by Marshall’s wife, “in which Marshall used to seat people who came to see him.”2 The chair, however, was just one of the many laurels on which Pigou could rest. In the 1950s, Pigou, now in his seventies, began to take his retirement to heart. He still traveled up to Lower Gatesgarth at every opportunity, though by this point, he shared the house with Claude Elliott. Elliott served as president of the Royal Alpine Society from 1950 to 1952, and in that capacity, planned a good deal of the first successful ascent of Everest from the dark sitting room overlooking Buttermere.3 Pigou also still journeyed to the Alps, traveling “in safety by air in a Swiss plane,” and bringing along Tom Gaunt’s son (also Noel-Baker’s godson), David, for “instruction in mountaineering under the guide, Tom, but not his wife.”4 Pigou was also a frequent visitor at his friends’ houses, where he was a first class curmudgeon. He directed Noel-Baker that “you are to come visit me here . . . or to receive me, without any ‘entourage de cochons [pigs].’”5 When visiting Tom Gaunt, he pilfered his friend’s stationery.6 When planning to attend Wilfrid Noyce’s wedding, he bragged that he would be robed in “a claret-colored tie, jumper, socks, and handkerchiefs,” a picture of sartorial splendor.7
Pigou in 1920.
What a difference a few decades makes. Pigou and Frank Adcock in King’s College, 1954.
Pigou’s penchant for complaint and grumbling about politics persisted as well. As Noel-Baker relayed the internal bickering among Labour Party ministers, Pigou responded with sympathy and cynicism, announcing during a visit to Tom Gaunt that Lower Gatesgarth would “secede from the Commonwealth.” And when Noel-Baker was passed over for a position of leadership, Pigou commiserated and urged him to “abandon the doomed vessel and return to the gowns of Academia.”8 He took to composing poems about politicians. In one, he imagined the nation’s leaders reveling during a time of postwar rationing:
Champagne for us; though there’s coal for none
And meat for none and the nuts are done!
Champagne for us; let the vermin pay!
. . .
Till the sun goes down we will make our hay!
We shall keep our jobs; hip hip hooray!9
In another, this one for Francis Noel-Baker, Philip’s son and Pigou’s godson, he commemorated a Labour Party conference on the Isle of Wight:
The rats went down to the Isle of Wight,
The little rats and the great Big Rat!
. . .
They talked all day and they dreamed all night
Of whom to expel and whose back to pat.10
But despite all the vitriol Pigou spewed during the late 1940s and 1950s, he was hardly as despairing or as resentful as he had been over the preceding one and a half decades, especially after Noel-Baker was named Minister of Fuel and Power in 1950.
Nor was there ever any doubt of his affection for his friends or theirs for him. In the early fifties, Pigou began composing short stories for Wilfrid Noyce’s son, whom he called “Gaters,” the boy’s middle name being Gatesgarth. Featuring Gaters and his “girl friend Tiger Lily,” the tales were the product, in the words of Gaters’s mother, of the “Prof. at his most whimsical and far too clever for children.”11 Pleased with himself, he submitted a manuscript to Macmillan. “Bits of it have been tried out successfully on several children,” Pigou bragged, “and several parents (female) have said, ‘O Professor Pigou, why don’t you publish your delightful stories?’”12 The editors were unmoved, but those personally close to Pigou were not. After all, Pigou was a devoted friend and, in the words of one of his longtime colleagues, his “young friends were indeed what he lived for.”13 In the end, not one family member inherited from Pigou. Although he had originally considered leaving a tidy sum to one of his nephews, he changed his mind when he discovered that the nephew in question was “well-to-do.” Therefore, his wealth—£27,290 according to probate records—was left to his friends, the people who had ensured his personal welfare, by cutting through his pervasive ire and disillusionment.14
Back in Cambridge, Pigou was finally feeling at ease. Certainly, his softening toward the public and his general change in outlook were naturally concordant with a late-blooming acceptance of his waning position in academic economics. It was not that Pigou retired completely from academic circles. He continued to contribute to organs like The Economic Journal and Economica, and between 1947 and 1954, he published twelve journal articles, several of which were quite technical.15 But he also began to explore new topics and relaxed his standards on political advocacy in economics journals as he was doing in his submissions to the popular press. Harkening back to his pre-professorial days, he wrote on historical political economy and current affairs. In 1948, he used a review of Lionel Robbins’s The Economic Problems of Peace and War to muse on central planning. Again, he advocated limited but rigorous planning, a position consistent with his support for Labour’s postwar policies. “The doors are wide open,” he wrote, “through which the State may claim, as a good neighbour, to step in.”16 The next year, he authored a short piece in The Economic Journal about J. S. Mill on wages.17
What was of key importance was that at this stage in his life, Pigou was under no illusion about contributing groundbreaking work. Writing to R. F. Kahn, he asked for candid edits. “Please tell me without camouflage whether it is bunk. The brain having softened, I can no longer distinguish between bunk and non-bunk, and so must rely on comments not buttered.”18 By the late 1940s, Pigou readily admitted his own fallibility to younger economists. To Richard Stone, a colleague in his thirties working heavily in statistics and national accounting, he wrote in 1948 of uncompleted projects with the apology that he was “too gaga to do it now.”19 Later, in response to being sent one of Stone’s articles, he ruefully noted: “It is possible, though not likely that I shall eventually understand it! Now . . . economics is becoming a branch of mathematics—which, so far as I ever knew any, I have completely forgotten! Alas for ‘progress’! I feel like St. John, ‘like a sea-jelly’ left astrand at Patmos.”20 Even to Hugh Dalton, the “first-class tick,” Pigou admitted that he was “no longer on the active list as an economist.” Welfare economics, he complained, had “now become mixed up with highly complicated mathematical arguments about utility . . . with which I’m not now, if I ever was, competent to cope.”21
It was not just in private correspondence that Pigou acknowledged his own limitations. His articles sounded a deferential tone. He wrote to R. F. Harrod, now one of the editors of The Economic Journal in 1949, claiming, “having become too stupid to contribute, I’m becoming a commentator.”22 He even softened somewhat on Keynes’s work. In 1949, three years after Keynes’s death, Pigou wrote a short book on Keynes in which he praised the latter’s “fundamental conception” of how the market worked, bringing “all the relevant factors, real and monetary at once, together in a formal scheme.” Though he warned that “Keynesianism” was “in danger of becoming a new orthodoxy,” he acknowledged that he had “failed to grasp its significance” in his earlier critical review.23
Throughout the late 1940s and 1950s, Pigou found his earlier work invoked and critiqued, often by unfamiliar and distant voices, many from the ever more important academic centers of the United States. Pigou and his work now existed in a fundamentally altered world order. The British Empire no longer ruled the waves, and Pigovian economics no longer represented the cutting edge of academic thought. When Pigou responded to invocations and references to his work, he did so principally to correct minor instances of misinterpretation or merely to comment on a new idea. “It is a misfortune of longevity,” he wrote, “that things which one wrote long ago survive in . . . later versions of one’s books. When errors are found in these things . . . it is only with extreme difficulty that the antiquated author can bring his mind—what is left of it—to bear on them again.24 Despite the difficulty, Pigou did bring his mind to bear on new ideas, especially those related to his early work on welfare. His goal, however, was not to critique or defend, but to explain his original intent to scholars who may not have been out of school when the piece in question had first been published. Responding in 1951 to an article by the American economist Paul Samuelson, which positively but critically invoked his “classic” treatment of national income in light of new developments in welfare economics, Pigou, then in his seventies, wrote:
It is not surprising that serious defects in my treatment have been revealed. I do not want to challenge Professor Samuelson’s argument on any substantial matter. The most useful way, I think, in which I can comment is by saying in my own language—his tools come unhandily to me—how these things seem to me to stand now.25
Pigou would use his own tools, but even in their use, he would not fundamentally challenge any new work done on the subject on which he had labored decades before, avoiding any controversy around interpersonal comparisons of utility.26 Four months later, in a retrospective on welfare economics written for the American Economic Review, he acknowledged that he was very much out of the currents of contemporary work. “A great deal has been written on this subject in recent years,” he noted, “and most of it I have not read.”27
In 1952 and 1953, Pigou delivered the Marshall Lectures at Cambridge, a yearly lecture series that had been launched in 1946 in honor of his teacher. In his first, he “welcomed the chance” of “escaping for a moment from that shadowed land where departed spirits dwell.”28 Finding a topic on which to declaim was no simple task, Pigou explained, “for in that land memories fade and powers of concentration dwindle.” Ultimately, he came to the conclusion that as one of the “few survivors” of those whom Marshall taught, perhaps the most useful thing he could do was to “act as a liaison officer” between his long-departed teacher and the current generation of economists that knew the master only through his portrait in the library. The resulting lectures, published in 1953 as Alfred Marshall and Current Economic Thought, offered a commentary on current economic debates as he felt Marshall might have delivered it, covering a ride range of topics, including mathematical methods, utility, and socialism. For an aging Pigou, the work was a natural one to write. For though he had not given up academic economics, he had openly stopped trying to forge new thought. He was, instead, an elder statesman of his field whose age and experience were to be valued on their own terms.
With this new role, Pigou commented with increasing transparency on his ethical motivations. Reinvigorated by the possibility for meaningful political change, he returned to the positions for which Joan Robinson had referred to him as the “first serious optimist.” In a 1951 letter to Dalton, his ethical commitments were back on display. “The point about economics being not a normative science is, of course, only one of methodological convenience,” Pigou wrote. “Nobody suggests that an economist shouldn’t have ethical opinions; only it’s convenient not to call them economics.”29
In the retrospective article for the American Economic Review, Pigou was explicit that the raison-d’être for welfare economics was “to suggest lines of action—or non-action—on the part of the State or of private persons that might foster . . . the economic welfare of the world.”30 Without great argument, he stolidly reiterated his commitment to interpersonal comparisons of utility, not only because he thought that such measurements that existed could be compared but also out of a theoretical necessity: “if economic welfare were not something to which the notion of greater or less were applicable, welfare economics would vanish away.”31
The world needed welfare economics, and so did Pigou. With the rise of the Labour Party and more activist governments in countries around the world, the social significance of his economics of welfare reemerged as his final justification, a system whose truth and usefulness stood as his lasting contribution to the world. Keynes had overturned his work on unemployment, but his contributions about welfare, despite the concerted attacks of Robbins and his followers in the 1930s, were to live on.
Welfare economics, however, was not just a former project whose resuscitation gave Pigou a sense of fulfillment. It also lent him fame and validation. Throughout the fifties, he would be recognized for his contributions, perhaps most notably by the Academia Nazionale dei Lincei in 1955, which elected him a foreign member and awarded him a 5 million lira (about £3,000) prize.32 More importantly, however, his welfare economics seemed to acquire a new luster in the age of the burgeoning welfare state. Pigou’s welfare economics may not have directly precipitated the welfare state, but it participated importantly in a liberal turn toward increasingly social and communal thinking—consider, for instance, Hugh Dalton’s assertion that Wealth and Welfare was his “ethical starting point for economic journeys.” And though the roots of the welfare state were multifarious, it was certainly a product of this broad intellectual movement.33
Throughout his career, Pigou had called for greater government intervention in the operation of the market. In retrospect, it is especially notable that he had specifically endorsed more steeply graduated tax regimes, more extensive state-mandated social insurance, and even the nationalization of key industries. In the postwar period, Pigou recognized the ethical impulses that motivated Labour Party leaders to be very similar to his own. Thus, Labour’s ability and wherewithal to implement its 1945 manifesto gave Pigou both real hope, and, on some level, vindication. And despite his continued mockery of party leaders in his private letters to Noel-Baker and others, the success of Labour’s enduring reforms ensured that that hope would be sustained even after the party’s electoral defeat in 1951.
With hope came a new sense of promise, a heightened resolve to commit himself to justice and “GOOD WORKS.” Despite continuing surliness, Pigou reinvested himself in questions of fairness and justice. These ethical considerations, which had lurked in the shadows of his economics for decades, reemerged into the light of publication. In 1954, for the first time since 1907, Pigou wrote a piece, “Some Aspects of the Welfare State,” for a philosophical journal, and not just any journal, but Diogenes, a new international journal of the social sciences that was simultaneously printed in French, English, and Spanish. Other early contributors included the French anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss; the American historian Oscar Handlin; and the German theorist Gerhard Ritter, whose piece on totalitarianism appeared just pages after Pigou’s. The setting of Pigou’s article thus reflected the extent to which Pigou himself had changed. Even a few short years before, he was a man who referred to foreign languages as “Wop, Frog, Jap, Hun,” and who, after impugning “talking to Yanks and Yank food,” referred to San Francisco as a “film-star ridden inferno.”34 Now he was seemingly embracing a more international public sphere.
Pigou was introduced by the editor of Diogenes as having “had a decisive part in the genesis of [the] great intellectual and moral mutation” of an “almost universal demand for the ‘Welfare State.’” Speaking from this elevated podium, Pigou launched into an authoritative overview, outlining tasks for which the welfare state was responsible.35 It was to intervene to provide public goods like roads, and it was to look out for people who might not have their own best interests in mind by, for instance, providing mandatory basic education. It might also step in to regulate people like factory owners, whose activities yielded “uncovenanted damage on other people whose . . . losses do not enter into the[ir] calculations.” In a moment of self-congratulation, Pigou noted that “these gaps . . . between private and public costs were not much in people’s minds until fairly recently. Now everybody understands about them.”36
Pigou offered up time-honored ideas, condensed into reflection on a life’s work in welfare. His words, however, had taken on a new kind of tone. Like his early pieces from the time before he became a professor, “Some Aspects of the Welfare State” manifested a fusion of ethics, politics, and economics. This resurrected and retooled synthesis was, by turns, earthy and soaring. Pigou grumbled about politicians and the ease with which democratic ideals could be corrupted. Elected officials were “not philosopher kings and a blueprint [for beneficial State action] might quickly yield place on their desks to the propaganda of competing pressure groups.” “‘Fancy’ finance,” he continued, “like a fancy franchise, whatever its theoretical attractions, has, at all events in a democracy, dim practical prospects.”37 But despite the regrettable incompetence and weakness of certain officials, Pigou was still firm in his desire for the state to be, in Marshall’s phrase, “up-and-doing.” Citing the absence of perfect competition, he dismissed the “thesis that Government should stand aside because private individuals know their own business and their own wants better than officials.” “The Welfare State,” Pigou defiantly declared, “will certainly not stand aside.”38
This was a manifesto many years in the making, one that incorporated both the hopeful, idealistic theories of the young don and those of an old man, tempered by decades of experience. The result was arresting. Here, Pigou, for so long an apolitical commentator, loudly declared that the Welfare State, with all of its left-leaning connotations, was ultimately an instrument of social justice.
The [Labour] slogan fair shares, though a meaningless noise so long as fair is undefined, illustrates the benevolent, if muddled, aspirations of many enthusiasts for welfare. These seem at first sight so obviously right that to discuss them is a waste of time. But they were not always deemed obvious.39
In the past, Pigou claimed, popular perception held that to help the poor was to render them “idle and thriftless.” To prevent mill owners from employing children for fourteen-hour days was also considered wrong. “To be poor was one’s own fault, a crime fitly punished by suffering.” These commonly held sentiments had, after so many years, been debunked and dismissed. “Other people’s poverty is no longer a crime; that is now the fate of other people’s wealth!” In this new, more morally sensitive context, redistribution was both natural and right. Besides, Pigou claimed, satisfaction was in large part social—after a certain point it had more to do with relative wealth than with absolute wealth.40 “If everybody else is flaunting a pearl necklace and I, being for the purpose of the argument a lady, am not, I am grieved. But if nobody has a pearl necklace, I shall be equally content with glass beads.” At long last, the mature Pigou had arisen, a Pigou who moved naturally from theory to humor to moral dictum.
With a nod toward the internationalism of his friend Noel-Baker, Pigou even looked beyond domestic social welfare policy. The pair worked together over the summers of the mid-1950s on Noel-Baker’s book called The Arms Race: A Programme for World Disarmament, a project that helped Noel-Baker win the Nobel Peace Prize in 1959. In Noel-Baker’s words, Pigou “read everything I read and discussed it enthusiastically with me. After I was getting in great difficulties about how to arrange my material and make the argument of my book hold together, he made a complete plan for a book in 7 parts.” This plan was adopted, Noel-Baker claimed, “in toto.”41 The 1954 Diogenes article also reflected Pigou’s collaboration with Noel-Baker. “To reduce international tension, and therewith the need for armaments,” Pigou wrote, “is probably the greatest . . . contribution that a statesman could make to the development of the Welfare State.” Moreover, in it, he evinced a sharp ethical concern with global inequality and wondered whether it would not be hypocritical for a welfare state to ignore “the distresses of less fortunate parts of the world,” an important statement made during a long decade of decolonization.42
At the time of his final book’s publication in 1955, Pigou was at his most openly egalitarian. This last book, Income Revisited, was the sequel to Income, his popular textbook from 1946, and in both its exposition as well as its ethical claims, it continued along the lines set by its predecessor. Like the first, it was aimed at “the plain man,” but it was even more explicit in its democratizing method and its efforts at inclusiveness. “The plain man confronted with recent refinements in economic theory, often expressed in mathematical language,” Pigou wrote, “may be tempted to think that the subject is one entirely for specialists and not for such as him.” However, “economic happenings affect the plain man in his private life and, maybe, have a bearing on his political judgment.”43 Twenty years before, in a book intended to be generally accessible, Pigou had likened the public to goats. Now he welcomed his readership warmly, offering that “behind the complications of advanced analysis there is a central core of economic truth which can, I think, be made intelligible to any educated person who chooses to take a little trouble.”44 The book, like its predecessor, endeavored to help make economics intelligible and was clearly set out with simple chapter titles like “Money,” “How Capital Is Built Up,” and “Social and Private Cost.”
Yet Income Revisited was not just a reference for armchair economists but also an inherently political work with clear ethical arguments. Four years before his death, in the final chapter of his final book, Pigou threw off the cross he had borne for five decades. He observed that economics was a study of what tends to happen rather than what ought to happen.
Questions about what is just or fair lie beyond its scope, and the law-abiding economist will not trespass among them. Definitions, however, are made for man, not man for definitions, and I do not propose to be law-abiding.45
Pigou broke the law with a splash. He titled the book’s concluding chapter “Fair Shares for All,” the former Labour Party slogan. And in the chapter itself, Pigou set out the most radical ethical opinion he had ever espoused.
In Income, Pigou had argued for equality of opportunity. In Income Revisited, he went much further. Fairness, he wrote, meant “equal shares for all” qualified first “by reference to differences in objective needs,” and second (and less importantly), “by reference to difference in contributions of service.” Pigou had, after years of avoiding moral philosophy, come out as an egalitarian, and a very strong one at that. On the second qualification—difference in contribution—he wrote:
A man may put more into a pool either because he is stronger or more intelligent or possesses a kind of skill which at the moment is in specially keen demand, or because he works for longer hours or more intensively or has devoted more time and labour to training and improving his faculties than others have.46
Inequalities that resulted from ability or intellect, however, were hardly fair. “Greater strength or natural intelligence creates an obligation, not a claim!” Even rewards gained from luck, especially those made on the stock market, were unearned, and therefore unfair.47 In any event, Pigou wrote, “we should not . . . consider it fair for differences in contribution to be associated with anything like equal differences of reward.” Thus, “very large differences of disposable income, whatever their cause, are on this plane of thinking not fair.”48 The political message was clear. Redistribution of the sort expected of the welfare state was as much an ethical imperative as it was an economic one.
Income Revisited displayed the nature of Pigou’s ethical thinking more clearly than any of his work since his taking the Chair in Political Economy. His ethics had changed considerably since then, shedding both their classism and their Government House mentality. With the hindsight of his own loss of status and his continued distaste for government hacks, Pigou had developed a democratized concept of fairness that stressed equality. This new egalitarianism, though idealistic, was still, in an important sense, pragmatic. It stemmed not only from his disenchantment with elites but also from Pigou’s renewed hope that politicians and economists could, in some synergistic enterprise, change the world for the better.
In the broadest of brushstrokes, Pigou’s changing relationship with the state depended on the rising importance of economic expertise in state management throughout the early twentieth century. Yet Pigou’s story demonstrates that the new scientific experts were often independent thinkers and not always eager participants in state projects.49 For Pigou, politics and personal experience played vital roles in his understanding of the state. His move from Liberal to Labour mirrored Britain’s; like Britain’s, it was forged in the crucible of World War I. But his was also, to a large extent, made possible by his own particular intellectual and professional experiences of disciplinary shift and loss. Without having been overtaken by his professional colleagues, it is dubious that he would ever have turned to the public. Without having known professional hardship in the 1930s and the traumas of war, he would never have been able to rekindle the hope of his youth.
But a large part of the credit for the shift in Pigou’s thinking should be claimed by the Labour Party itself. Pigou’s ethics were able to shrug off its Government House mentality because of the success of Labour’s commitment to and execution of a limited form of central planning. Labour’s accomplishments reawakened Pigou’s dream of a competent intervener. This time, however, the nature of the intervener reflected Labour’s vision of a just future based on equality, not on mere management. At the end of his life, A. C. Pigou had come more than full circle. He had returned to a broad, multivalent practice of political economy, one in which his ethics took a prominent public role. More than that, he had discovered a new hopeful vision of a more democratic future. Ironically, only as a surly old don considered by many to be a recluse, did Pigou truly embrace people.
Epilogue
It is tempting to look back on Pigou’s life and work to find lessons for our current predicaments. There is a tendency to worship long-dead economists as sages who presaged the crises of the future. And, in light of Pigou’s work on external diseconomies, his analysis of the costs of pollution, his distaste for massive disparities in wealth, and even his preference for a stable financial sector, there is a powerful urge to review his corpus of work and conclude that he was ahead of his time—that quite simply, he got things right.
Pigou certainly endowed future generations of economic thinkers with a powerful set of tools, tools that current economists may do well to reexamine. There is, however, something uncomfortable about the conclusion that Pigou was “correct” or that he presaged some of the developments after his death. The principal lesson of Pigou’s life is that his work grew out of a specific historical moment. It emerged from personal interactions with government officials, from conversations with his friends, from contemporary economic and political conditions, and from the shifting sands on which economic ideas rested. Pigou responded to a growth in heavy industry that was destroying the environment, to a growing national perception of inequality, and to a major financial crisis. Is it any wonder that his ideas resonate today?
But whether or not Pigou’s ideas are borne out in reality, there is a clear lesson to be drawn from his life’s work. Pigou, like almost all of his contemporaries, was an ethical economist. He set himself to explaining and solving the most pressing crises of his day. And he did not shirk in his diligence. His justification for his career, maybe even for his very existence, was to serve a moral end. Perhaps it is this part of Pigou’s systematic framework—its self-conscious motivation—that present-day economists would do best to revisit. The world is today faced with a host of economic crises, but they are equally moral crises. Returning to a truly Pigovian way of thinking would mean honoring this fact and acknowledging it publicly. It would mean accepting what Pigou had declared in 1908, that “Ethics and Economics are mutually dependent,” and that “economics cannot stand alone.”9
D E Moggeridge, Maynard Keynes, An economists biography, Roubtledge, London and NY, 1992, p. 553.
Louis Germain and Albert Camus Letters (letters such as I - as both an adult to my teachers - have sent/and-or received as replies from my teachers or sent to former students); Beautiful Streets (some of which I have known - if not those pictured); and Stepwells - just last year visited between Jaipur and Agra; plus skim-reading - parts of the Pigou re-visit - splendid, NG. Thank-you.
Ai contra story for education is the teacher having not read the set book used LLM to generate question on the book. Turned out the AI had not read the book either...
Louis Germain and Albert Camus Letters (letters such as I - as both an adult to my teachers - have sent/and-or received as replies from my teachers or sent to former students); Beautiful Streets (some of which I have known - if not those pictured); and Stepwells - just last year visited between Jaipur and Agra; plus skim-reading - parts of the Pigou re-visit - splendid, NG. Thank-you.
Ai contra story for education is the teacher having not read the set book used LLM to generate question on the book. Turned out the AI had not read the book either...