Professor Robin Matthews, Oxford Master and Economist, 83
Professor Robin Matthews, who died on June 19 aged 83, held the two most senior chairs of economics in Britain – the Drummond Chair at Oxford and the Chair of Political Economy at Cambridge, where he was also a popular and long-serving Master of Clare College; outside his discipline he was a leading exponent of directmate three-movers in chess.
Matthews described himself as writing economic history in the style of an economist. Sceptical of conventional economic models of "rational individualistic utility maximisation", his interests moved toward the institutional and psychological underpinnings of economic behaviour.
His most cited and admired article, however, was a 1968 paper in the Economic Journal on why Britain had had full employment since the war. In this he argued that far from injecting demand into the system, governments in the so-called "Golden Age of Keynesianism" had persistently run large current account surpluses, instead of the budget deficits that would have been the expected manifestation of a Keynesian stimulus. From this he inferred that fiscal policy had been not only deflationary, but strongly so in the post-war period, therefore something other than Keynesian fiscal policy must have been responsible. The answer, he felt, lay in demand arising out of wartime destruction and an unusually prolonged private sector investment boom....
Read entire article at Telegraph (UK)
Matthews described himself as writing economic history in the style of an economist. Sceptical of conventional economic models of "rational individualistic utility maximisation", his interests moved toward the institutional and psychological underpinnings of economic behaviour.
His most cited and admired article, however, was a 1968 paper in the Economic Journal on why Britain had had full employment since the war. In this he argued that far from injecting demand into the system, governments in the so-called "Golden Age of Keynesianism" had persistently run large current account surpluses, instead of the budget deficits that would have been the expected manifestation of a Keynesian stimulus. From this he inferred that fiscal policy had been not only deflationary, but strongly so in the post-war period, therefore something other than Keynesian fiscal policy must have been responsible. The answer, he felt, lay in demand arising out of wartime destruction and an unusually prolonged private sector investment boom....