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Issue no. 193

April 2021 www.res.org.uk | @RoyalEconSoc

A Farewell
Letter from America
Sir Angus Deaton writes to us one last time
CONTENTS
Inside this issue…
APRIL 2021 | ISSUE NO. 193
major shocks to economic
activity leave long shadows
see page 12
01 THE EDITORIAL
Endings and new beginnings: a brief
introduction to the redesigned April
2021 issue, from the new editor
02 LETTER FROM…
The farewell Letter from America by
Sir Angus Deaton, reflecting on past
Letters, and his life and times
07 LETTER FROM… HIGHLIGHTS
Highlights from the Letters from
America, chosen by the editor, and
an appreciation from Peter Howells
10 PROFILE
From Marshall to obesity, and other
discoveries: a question-and-answer
profile of Dame Rachel Griffith
@RoyalEconSoc    |    www.linkedin.com/company/royal-economic-society    |    www.youtube.com/user/RoyalEconomicSociety
12 THE COVID-19 RECESSION
AND HEALTH
James Banks, Heidi Karjalainen, and
Dame Carol Propper consider how
the Covid-19 recession will influence
future health
15 AN UPDATE FROM THE
ECONOMICS NETWORK
Alvin Birdi and Caroline Elliott
take stock on the pivot to
teaching online, and describe the
ongoing response of the
Economics Network
18 COMMENT
A comment from Jan Toporowski,
and a response from the original
authors, Roger Backhouse and
James Forder
20 THE WOMEN’S COMMITTEE
How concrete steps on recruitment
could improve the representation of
women in economics
21 THE ECONOMIC JOURNAL
An update on a year in the life of
the Economic Journal, based on the
detailed report for 2020
22 OBITUARIES
An obituary for Domenico Mario
Nuti, prepared by Joseph Halevi
and Peter Kriesler
23 NEWS
A selection of news items, including
a new Joint Managing Editor for the
Economic Journal

The editor:
JONATHAN TEMPLE
A guide to the April issue
T
his is an issue of endings
and new beginnings. Sir
Angus Deaton has contrib-
uted a much-admired Letter from
America every six months for
twenty-five years, but has decided
that the one in this issue will be
his last. His farewell Letter is a
retrospective, longer than usual,
and reminds us of what we will
be missing. We also present some
highlights from his past Letters.
My hope is that the latter feature
will be as much fun to read as it
was to prepare, and I would like to
thank Angus for his illuminating
contributions over so many years.
The new beginnings include the
first in a series of profiles of lead-
ing economists, which will often
feature economists connected to
the RES. We start with a Past RES
Another beginning President, Dame Rachel Griffith.
will be obvious: our Elsewhere in the issue, you can
new look. We hope find an article by James Banks,
Heidi Karjalainen, and Dame Carol
you like it Propper on the long-run effects of
the Covid-19 recession on health.
A feature by Alvin Birdi and Car-
EDITORIAL 01
oline Elliott takes stock of online
teaching and the response of the
Economics Network. For more
information on economics and the
pandemic, see the Covid-19 hub on
the RES website.
Another beginning will be obvi-
ous: our new look. We hope you
like it. The issue would not have
been possible in this form without
the unstinting help of the outgoing
editor, Peter Howells, and the new
designer, Phil McAllister. Many
thanks to them both, and to Helen
Miller and Julia Randall-Edwards
for their advice and guidance.
Finally, the previous issue
included an excellent piece on the
history of economic thought by
Roger Backhouse and James Forder.
In this issue, Jan Toporowski
responds. He draws on the work of
Gunnar Myrdal to argue that eco-
nomics is often, or even always, pol-
itics in another guise. The original
authors provide a measured reply.
Some economists would have chosen
to be less measured – but that is for
each reader to decide.
02 LETTER FROM…
Letter from America:
ANGUS DEATON
A Farewell
Letter from America
After twenty-five years of writing for the Newsletter, Sir Angus Deaton contributes his final
Letter from America, in which he reflects on past Letters, economics, and his life and times
W
hen I was a Research
Officer in the Department
of Applied Economics in
Cambridge in the early 1970s, I
was befriended by Thelma Liesner,
then Thelma Seward. When she
became Editor of the Newsletter
in 1995, and after I had moved
to Princeton, she remembered
me and, because she was a fan of
Alistair Cooke’s Letter from Amer-
ica on BBC Radio 4, she suggested I
might write a Letter about economic
events in America. She suggested
the budget, which I never did
write about, if only because, unlike
Britain where the contents of the
budget become law, the American
“budget” is a fantasy wish list that
the White House sends to Congress
each year. But I did find other
things to write about—this is my
50th letter—and found an ideal
outlet in the Newsletter, always
attractively produced, relatively
short, and with news, professional
information, and obituaries. I was
always pleased when it landed on
my desk and always looked at it,
and others appeared to do so too.
Thelma retired in 1997, and
since then I have worked with
the admirable Peter Howells, who
has been a model of punctuality,
encouragement, and appreciation.
The Letter helped me learn to
write for a non-specialist audi-
ence, or at least a non-specialist
audience of economists, a half-way
house that is much easier than
writing for newspapers. It allowed
me to write about things that
interested me but didn’t always
know much about, and I am grate-
ful for my readers’ forbearance.
Writing the Letter has rarely felt
like work, more often joy. Many
have been kind enough to say nice
things over the years, and it seems
that many readers know of me
only through the Newsletter.
I moved to Princeton from Bris-
tol in 1983. I have never given up
my British citizenship, and did not
become an American citizen until
2012, in part because, until Obama
became president, I was less than
enthusiastic about swearing alle-
giance to the United States and
its leadership. But as the years
passed, it seemed perverse not to
acknowledge that my home was
here, not to mention the homes
of my children and grandchildren
who had built their own lives in
Chicago and New York.
More ominously, non-citizens
have always been at risk in the US,
especially after 9/11, even before
the horrors of Trump. Under the
Patriot Act of 2001 (“Inequality
in America”, April 2002), univer-
sities were commanded to hand
over personnel files of non-citizens
on demand, and prohibited from
divulging that they had done so. In
my own case, I (think I) suffered
nothing worse than the boorish
attentions of an immigration officer,
who took a dislike to me, tore up
my green card, and turned my life
into a bureaucratic hell that lasted
for more than a year. As President
Obama writes in his autobiog-
raphy, immigrants “are always
afraid that the life you’d worked so
hard to build might be upended in
an instant.” Even after that near
upending, I was deterred from
applying by the impossible require-
ment that I document every trip
abroad for the last 30 years, until
I eventually realized that, for the
earlier trips, their records were no
better than mine. And Anne found
my old passports in the basement.

Once I decided to apply for
citizenship, the lights turned on,
and the agency that I’d seen as a
Writing the Letter has persecutor became my friend. The
rarely felt like work, bureaucracy could not have been
more helpful—votes matter—and I
more often joy
even qualified for a special old-age
dispensation that allowed me to
answer correctly only 12 out of 20
possible questions (instead of 60
out of 100), many of which had the
same answer. (What is the capi-
tal of America? Who was the first
president? Who famously crossed
LETTER FROM… 03
the Delaware?) As a final hurdle,
with no chance to prepare, on the
day of the ceremony, I was asked at
the door whether, in the two weeks
since I had passed the test, I had
worked as a prostitute. My late col-
league, Uwe Reinhardt, claimed to
have answered “I have long looked
for something in that line of work,
but so far without success.” At the
ceremony, the immigration official
who welcomed the new Americans
began by telling us that voting
was not an important part of citi-
04 LETTER FROM…
zenship, something that I already
knew to be false. I resisted the urge
to raise my hand.
That I long did not become
American reflected real ambiva-
lence, admiring many aspects of
American life while watching oth-
ers with fascinated horror. Both
reactions are well represented
in the Letters. I frequently wrote
about the immense prosperity of
American institutions like Prince-
ton, how their riches were put at
the service of scholarship, but how
wealthy universities, faced with
(relative) adversity after the finan-
cial crisis, acted to protect their
endowments, rather than using
them to ride out the crash (“Moon
over Texas,” October 2010). I wrote
about some of the best of Amer-
ican economics, how immensely
distinguished scholars—and oth-
ers—served changing administra-
tions in Washington (“News for
parrots,” April 2001). About how
the National Bureau of Economic
Research, under its longtime pres-
ident (the late) Marty Feldstein,
generated a stream of invaluable
externalities to the profession
(“Economists without borders,”
October 1998).
The Newsletter, with an audi-
ence of economists, was a venue
where I could write about the
American profession, again with
both admiration and horror. Eco-
nomics remains extraordinarily
open to new ideas and to young
people; in the US, there are still
plenty of jobs, and talented people
can still be tenured at top univer-
sities in their 20s. The American
profession’s susceptibility to fads is
perhaps a consequence, though at
75, I doubt that I am a good judge.
If the profession does well by the
young, it does much less well by
women; as the number of female
economists grows so, rightly, do
the protests about how badly they
are treated in seminars and in the
refereeing process.
I have written (perhaps too
often) about the publication pro-
cess, which today seems badly
broken. The dominance of the top
Anne Case and Angus Deaton (image: Rebecca Wilcox,
Purdue University)
few journals, several not under
professional control, gives great
leeway to strong-minded and
sometimes idiosyncratic editors
who push their own views of what
is good economics, regardless of
whether the journals are owned
by a professional association. It
is hard to start a new journal, let
alone a top journal, and the rents
are sometimes subverted to idio-
syncratic agendas.
In one Letter in 2007, I wrote
positively about the extraordinary
breadth of research by job-market
candidates, in contrast to how
economics had been in 1983 when
I first arrived in Princeton, a time
when theorists, empiricists and
econometricians were all working
on different parts of what was
recognizably the same (price the-
ory) elephant (“Random walks by
young economists”, April 2007).
Of course, it was a myopic ele-
phant that knew little about pov-
erty, inequality, race, or health,
leaving such topics to other social
scientists. Of those job market
papers, I wrote that it was often
hard to tell to which field of eco-
nomics they belonged. Today, the
divergence has gone further, so
that, for example, looking at the
contents of recent issues of the
American Economic Review, it is
hard to tell what subjects they
cover, or whether economics has a
recognizable core. Perhaps that is
all to the good.
The American profession can
look after itself, but publication
in these same top journals has
increasingly been used to assess
young economists around the
world, risking the demise of distinct
approaches and schools that one
day will be necessary for economics
to evolve or to save it from exces-
sive American inbreeding. And
even within the US, I wrote of my
horror at being told in a post-job-
market seminar office visit that, for
the candidate, whose talk demon-
strated great virtuosity but neither
concern for nor awareness of previ-
ous scholarship or approaches, the
main threat to productivity was the
amount of top-journal refereeing
graduate students were expected
to do. In such an environment,
fads spread fast, and knowledge
cannot cumulate. In contrast, I told
a story from the 1970s about an
elderly Italian economist who, after
several glasses of brunello, splut-
tered with rage (and wine) about
a new journal (I suspect it was
the then newly-founded European
Economic Review) sending papers
to “unknown readers,” a procedure
that was an affront to age and dig-

nity, and indeed to the orderly pro-
duction of knowledge. At the time, I
thought our new world was better,
that meritocracy (and unknown
readers) were good things. Now, I
am not so sure. (And I am increas-
ingly fond of brunello.)
I frequently wrote about aspects
of American inequality, not only in
income and wealth, but inequality
across race and citizenship, and
my evolving understanding that
the American government, unlike
the British government, which
my parents and I had confidently
looked to for protection, was fre-
quently an oppressor, more often
redistributing up than down. One
of my colleagues in 1983 liked
to proclaim that “government is
theft.” I was appalled, but have
learned how often it is true. Mem-
bers of Congress impeded regu-
lators from stopping opioid man-
ufacturers and distributors from
addicting and killing tens of thou-
sands of less-educated Americans,
and they have consistently—across
both parties—prevented attempts
to rein in the depredations of a
healthcare system that absorbs a
fifth of GDP. There are five health-
care lobbyists in Washington for
every member of Congress.
Many Letters were about Amer-
ican healthcare, whose horrors are
an endless source of amazement
and amusement to British eyes.
Perhaps the highpoint was about
my own hip replacement (“Trying
to be a good hip-op consumer”,
April 2006), trying to find a good
surgeon in the first place (“He’s
the guy who did the Pope, but
he’s past it”) and being mistaken
for someone else at 3.00 am by a
terrifyingly insistent nurse armed
with drugs and needles. The point
of the piece was to document the
absurdity of expecting consumers
to shop for healthcare as they shop
for other items, an idea then being
pushed by the Bush administra-
The Madison Valley and Madison
Range in Montana, sometimes
mentioned in the Letters,
including this Farewell Letter
tion, and still today an item of
faith on the right, where free-mar-
ket fundamentalists believe there
is no problem that markets cannot
solve. One of my ongoing sorrows
about economics is that, amid the
cacophony of our conflicting recom-
mendations, we have not been able
to help politicians and the public
understand important, but per-
haps not so obvious things, like the
fact that free markets can’t deliver
healthcare. The piece was picked
up by one of the health columnists
in the New York Times, and my
hip became famous. At my son’s
wedding, a guest asked who I was,
and when told flashed immediate
recognition, “aah, you’re the man
with the hip.”
In one Letter, when I was Pres-
ident of the American Economic
Association, I noted my surprise
at discovering that the AEA was
founded five years before the Royal
Economic Society, which began
in 1890 as the British Economic
Association, and whose founding
meeting was attended by Edwin
Cannan, Francis Ysidro Edge-
worth, Robert Giffen, Neville
Keynes, George Bernard Shaw,
and Alfred and Mary Paley Mar-
shall. Richard T. Ely, a founder of
the AEA, and its sixth president
in 1900-1901, was a leader of the
Progressive Movement, and wrote,
as part of the AEA’s platform,
that ‘the doctrine of laissez-faire is
LETTER FROM… 05
unsafe in politics and unsound in
morals.’ He was remembered annu-
ally after 1962 through the Richard
Ely lecture at the annual meetings.
In 2020, the Executive of the AEA
removed Ely’s name from the lec-
ture, not because of his views on
laissez-faire, but because he “wrote
approvingly of slavery and eugen-
ics, inveighed against immigrants,
and favored segregation,” views
inconsistent with the AEA’s code of
professional conduct. In “America
wakes up to inequality,” April 2014,
I wrote warmly about Woodrow
Wilson, a contemporary of Ely,
who struggled (in the end unsuc-
cessfully) against inequality and
privilege at Princeton, and (with
more success) in the United States
(he was President when the Consti-
tutional Amendments for women’s
suffrage and the income tax were
implemented). He too was “can-
celed” by Princeton in 2020, in part
for segregating the federal govern-
ment’s workforce, and his name no
longer appears on the School where
I once taught and worked. Amer-
ica—at least in part—has come to
understand that inequality is about
more than money.
Anne and I spend a month every
summer in Montana, a break that
keeps us sane, and the state itself,
where I usually write the fall Letter,
has often made an appearance. The
great cosmopolitan universities on
the coasts (Atlantic, Pacific, and
06 LETTER FROM…
Lake Michigan) are astonishingly
disconnected from much of America,
making it hard for those of us who
work in them to sympathize with
or understand the way that many
Americans think. This includes
their historically well-founded sus-
picion and detestation of the Fed-
eral Government. They often see
federal regulations as attempts by
outsiders to make them behave like
extras in the theme parks where
those outsiders come to play, outsid-
ers who have little understanding of
the ever more limited employment
opportunities for them and for their
children. You are unlikely to meet
someone in Princeton who has had
four children serve in the US mili-
tary. I drew a parallel—that I con-
tinue to see as real—between the
regulations that bother Montana
farmers, and the increasing meth-
odological regulation of academic
research, from which economics
is far from exempt (“Your wolf is
interfering with my t-value,”
October 2012).
My first Letter, in October 1996,
was about the minimum wage,
particularly the then new work
of my colleagues David Card and
Alan Krueger, and I returned to
it two years ago after Alan died.
I have never worked on the min-
imum wage, but the issues—how
to do empirical work, how to bring
evidence to bear on policy, the role
of theory, and the potential for
violent political controversy—are
ones that I care about.
The minimum wage work, and
its use of the natural experiment
methodology, seemed like magic
at the time, raising the curtain
on new possibilities of investiga-
tion. As with all new methods, its
problems became more apparent
over time, but the history since
1994 is important and instruc-
tive. For many economists, the
result that employment might go
up with an increase in the min-
imum wage was obviously false.
James Buchanan wrote that this
was like claiming that water runs
uphill, and was “equivalent to a
denial that there is even minimal
Princeton University, home to
Sir Angus Deaton since 1983
Economics remains
extraordinarily open to new
ideas and to young people
scientific content in economics.”
He went on to congratulate him-
self and the rest of the profession,
but presumably neither Card nor
Krueger, for not being “a bevy of
camp-following whores.” Another
notable economist, June O’Neill,
noted, like a good Bayesian, that
“theory is evidence too.” Of course,
the profession, camp followers or
not, understood that the empirical
result made sense if employers had
monopsony power, but that fast
food restaurants could be monop-
sonists was itself seen as likely as
water flowing freely uphill.
Jason Furman later wrote that
Card and Krueger’s work changed
the minds of half of the profession,
still a good description. In my
own judgment, the accumulating
evidence supports their original
results, as does the experience
in Britain after 2000, and, as a
result, the importance of monop-
sony is more widely recognized,
if far from universally so. This is
not just water flowing uphill, but
a whole new world, in which the
economy looks less like a benevo-
lent market and more like a class
struggle, in which working people
have good reason to mourn the
decline of unions. The intense
political reactions to the work from
deeply interested parties, espe-
cially the fast-food industry, would
have been no surprise to Adam
Smith when he wrote about “The
clamour of our merchants… for the
support of their own absurd and
oppressive monopolies.”
I also had the special pleasure
of writing about the events around
the Nobel Prize. One highpoint
that stays with me (“Special edi-
tion from Stockholm and Wash-
ington,” April 2016) was an event
that has not taken place since
2016, which is the reception in the
Oval Office of each year’s Ameri-
can laureates. President Obama
opened the door himself, and as I
shook his hand, I gestured towards
Anne behind me, beginning “I
would like to introduce. . .” which
was as far as I got. “Professor Case
needs no introduction to me, and
now we are going to discuss the
paper that you have both written.”
The paper—the first one of our
“deaths of despair” work—had
been published three days before,
and he had read it carefully, and
suggested that we draw a parallel
with the catastrophe in the Black
community forty years before, an
idea we adopted in our book. There
were no Nobel visits in the Trump
years; I quoted the quip from a
New York Times op-ed, asking
what Trump could possibly learn
from someone (Dick Thaler) who
works on the lack of self-control.
In the next Letter (“On becoming
superannuated,” October 2016),
I recounted the story of how the
Nobel magic brought humanity
and festivity to a dreary govern-
ment benefit office. As my friend
Danny Kahneman told me in
2002, the single best thing about
the prize is, not the happiness it
brings to the recipient, considera-
ble though that is, but the happi-
ness it brings to other people.
Writing these Letters has given
me great pleasure, and I hope
that it has brought pleasure to my
readers too.

Letter from America: highlights
The Letter from America
in Retrospect
We present highlights chosen by the Editor
On social security funding, April 1997
The [American social security] system could
be made solvent for the next 75 years if
the current social security payroll tax were
raised from the current 12.4 percent to 14.6
percent, a solution that is about as likely as
universal health insurance, gun control or
the abolition of the death penalty.
On policy debates, October 1999
… given the quality of much that is pub-
lished in both fields, it is hard to believe
that peer-review in either economics or
public health can bear the burden of certifi-
cation. When the results of working papers
posted to the web instantaneously become
part of the policy debate, traditional proce-
dures hardly seem adequate.
On economics and health research,
April 2000
… it is no longer unusual for economists to be
asked to team up with doctors who fear that
their research will not be funded without the
presence of economists and their insights about
behavior, for example about smoking or alcohol
consumption. These partnerships involve real
mutual learning and are more evenly balanced
than the much-noted imperialist excursions of
economics into other social sciences. Econom-
ics may be the 600 pound gorilla in the social
sciences jungle, but it’s still a barely visible
creature in the Bethesda zoo.
On the new George W. Bush administra-
tion, April 2001
[Larry] Lindsey has described the estate tax
(referred to by Republicans as the ‘death’
tax) as ‘the biggest impediment to capital
formation on the nation’s books.’ This view
LETTER FROM… HIGHLIGHTS 07
was immediately denounced by 120 billion-
aires (including George Soros, Bill Gates
père, and Warren Buffett) in an advertise-
ment in the New York Times…
From a letter on American development
policy, October 2002
The book [by William Easterly] ... will be
much enjoyed by professional economists for
its exposition in intelligent lay language of
how the technique of instrumental variables
solves the causality problem. (The intelli-
gent lay public is likely to doubt the sanity
of economists even further.)
Peter Howells, the former
Editor, writes:
When I took over from Thelma Liesner
in 1998, the ‘Letters from...’ America,
France and Germany were a regular and
popular feature. I have lost count of the
number of times, at various RES events,
that readers told me they enjoyed the
Newsletter and that it was worth reading
for Angus’s letter alone. (I took this as
a compliment in spite of its ambiguity.)
Dealing with his letter was certainly one
of the easiest of my tasks as editor. It
was always on time (one needs to have
been an editor to appreciate what a rare
and valuable quality that is); it never
needed any work; and above all it was
always interesting to read. I am pleased
to see that Angus has mentioned some
outstanding examples in his farewell
letter. I couldn’t have done that. They
were, all of them, gems.
08 LETTER FROM… HIGHLIGHTS
On the George W. Bush tax cuts, April 2003
In Washington, there will be deficits for
many years to come, in part in response to
a weaker economy, but mostly as the result
of tax cuts whose beneficiaries are typically
very well-off. In the states, most deficits
will be closed in a way that protects those
who are benefiting from the federal tax cuts.
There is no such protection for the elderly,
the poor, and the sick.
On American healthcare, April 2006
This situation has been compared by my
Princeton colleague Uwe Reinhardt to shop-
ping blindfold in a department store, and
then months later being presented with a
bill on which some items are charged at
full price, and some at some fraction of full
price, but with no advance knowledge of
either what one has bought or what it will
cost. And this is for those fortunate enough
to have insurance.
On changes in economics, April 2007
If the typical thesis of the eighties was an
elaborate piece of price theory estimated by
non-linear maximum likelihood on a very
small number of observations, the typical the-
sis of today uses little or no theory, much sim-
pler econometrics, and hundreds of thousands
of observations... The extent to which data
can effectively be substituted for theory is
clearly a topic that is being actively explored,
at least empirically... In the end, it is hard
not to think that the quality of research owes
more to people than to methods.
the refusal to consider ethical questions
explicitly but to leave them to the market
is surely the American vice. How do the
preferences of unborn generations get
expressed in the bond market?
On climate change and the Stern Review,
October 2007
If zero discounting (with perhaps a touch of
paternalism) is the British vice, the refusal
to consider ethical questions explicitly but
to leave them to the market is surely the
American vice. How do the preferences of
unborn generations get expressed in the
bond market? Do we really want to discrim-
inate across people by their date of birth? ...
Zero pure time preference, if it is a vice, is
surely a minor one. Relying on markets to
teach us ethics is very much worse.
On the Economic Journal, as part of a
letter on the AEA, April 2010
The first issue of the Economic Journal
starts with a statement of purpose by the
Editor, Edgeworth, proclaiming that the
‘difficulties of Socialism will be dealt with
in the first number, and the difficulties of
Individualism in the second.’
On economies and universities in reces-
sion, October 2010
…economics has failed to set any limits on
the public debate about cause and effect in
macroeconomics… what people think is well
predicted by their political ideology… While
I am not naïve enough to suppose that eco-
nomics has a core scientific content that
can be separated from politics, an outsider
might wonder just what we have all been
doing for the last eighty years.
On criticisms of economics, October 2011
Robert Zoellick… jibed that ‘in physics,
Nobel prizes are awarded for being correct
while in economics they are often awarded
for being brilliant’. (It is an interesting exer-
cise to list economics laureates, and allocate
them to one or other of Zoellick’s boxes.)
On economics and other disciplines, also
from October 2011
Behavioral economics and psychology are
everywhere, and it is much harder than
once was the case to see any real distinc-
tions between what economists do and what
is done by sociologists, psychologists, and
political scientists. This is not the imperi-
alist economic enterprise of 20 years ago,
where economists set out to conquer their
poor sisters – armed with rational choice and
a self-proclaimed monopoly on the tools of
causal inference… Instead, economists now
believe that it is impossible to think about
economic development, or about macroeco-
nomic policy, without incorporating politics,
and that sociology and psychology have seri-
ous things to tell us about human behavior.
On the costs of unemployment, April 2012
While there is endless speculation about the
effects of unemployment and recession on
the election prospects of President Obama
and his opponent… there is little discus-
sion of what the recession is actually doing

l have often thought of the story of the dog who liked to chase
buses, but had little idea of what it would be like to catch one.
The Nobel is not just catching the bus, but being run over by it
to people. Apparently, the main effects of
interest are those on the chances of politi-
cians in the election… Jobs mean more than
income, and the loss of a job brings a loss of
structure and meaning and it is most likely
this that brings the loss in well-being.
On economists and inequality, October 2013
Yet here are two areas [health and
gender equality] where I believe that econ-
omists, not through any political commit-
ment, but through their regular activities,
have been helping keep inequality under
control, and where, as is often the case,
the realisation comes only when they stop
doing so, or when the forces on the other
side win a victory.
On winning the 2015 Nobel Prize, April 2016
As many previous recipients have told, the
experience is both exhilarating and over-
whelming; l have often thought of the story
of the dog who liked to chase buses, but had
little idea of what it would be like to catch
one. The Nobel is not just catching the bus,
but being run over by it.
On the American healthcare debate,
April 2017
At the end of his [1963 AER] paper, Arrow
wrote: ‘It is the general social consensus,
clearly, that the laissez-faire solution for
medicine is intolerable.’ This is perhaps one
of the few sentences in the paper that has
not stood the test of time, though there is
nothing at all wrong with the last clause.
On personal memories of economists,
October 2017
The first seminar I ever heard in economics,
in Cambridge in 1969, was Tony [Atkinson]
presenting his famous paper on the meas-
urement of inequality. It made me think
that economics was a pretty cool subject, I
thought all economics talks were like this,
and it ruined me for a lifetime of seminars.
LETTER FROM… HIGHLIGHTS 09
On the minimum wage debate, April 2019
My friend Anthony Appiah, a philosopher
who thinks about and comments on public
policy, recently asked me, with some irrita-
tion, why economists had still not managed
to settle what seemed like a straightforward
question… But perhaps Appiah’s question
is ill-posed and has no general answer? Why
do we economists — as well as non-econo-
mists — suppose that the effect of a treat-
ment should always be the same, or at least
always act in the same direction?
On the Covid-19 pandemic, April 2020
But the truth is that no health system, how-
ever well designed and funded, could deal
with the plague that threatens to overwhelm
us. No planner would make preparations for
something that we have not seen in a cen-
tury, would construct intensive care units
that are almost always empty, nor construct
tens of thousands of ventilators that are
almost never needed and would rust in place.
On multiple crises, October 2020
…it is hard not to infer that, so long as the
elite are not suffering, and as long as the
stock-market remains airborne, our current
political system will not help those in trou-
ble… I hope that I am wrong. Perhaps there
is hope in the idea that it will take multiple
crises to change a deeply broken but well-de-
fended economic and political system.
The Letters from America
The RES has an online archive dating back to
April 2013, at
https://www.res.org.uk/news/newsletter/
The full set of Letters, from October 1996
onwards, is available here:
https://scholar.princeton.edu/deaton/
letters-america
10 PROFILE
The Profile: Dame Rachel Griffith
From Marshall to obesity,
and other discoveries
In this new series, we profile leading economists. We start with Past RES President,
Dame Rachel Griffith of the University of Manchester and the IFS
Let’s start with your background, and its
influence on you.
I am the youngest of four and grew up in
an environment where people were always
debating current events. From a young age
I was expected to argue my position. It was
great training to be an academic, and I’m
sure it helped to give me confidence to put
my own ideas forward.
My parents were from Texas. They both
had a strong work ethic, and strong moral
values. They instilled in us the idea that if
you are fortunate in life it is your respon-
sibility to work to help others who are less
fortunate. They were involved in the civil
rights movement, and anti-war activities.
My father was a freedom rider, and my
mother travelled to Vietnam to witness the
US bombing of civilians.
Growing up in this environment had
an enormous impact on me. I didn’t enjoy
school, and in fact dropped out and never
finished high school. I later went back and
took the Graduate Equivalency Degree
(GED) so that I could go to university. How-
ever, I don’t think this has really harmed
my career much. My parents and older
siblings had taught me how to think and
how to learn, and when I later got inter-
ested and returned to education, it wasn’t
too hard to catch up.
Are there people you especially admire?
Michelle Obama is someone who comes
across as having enormous integrity and
compassion. Her relationship with Barack
seems to be a genuine partnership. I admire
that she has been able to achieve all that
she has and still look like she’s having fun.
A very close second is Janet Yellen. She is
incredibly smart, public spirited, and - I can
only imagine - must have nerves of steel to
do the job she does. Yet she comes across as
kind, engaging, and genuinely interested in
what others think and do. She has done a
lot to promote equality and diversity in eco-
nomics, and I think we are all better for it.
Is there a book or paper that you think
all economists should read?
Marshall (1890), Principles of Economics, is
one of the best written and most insightful
books in economics that I have read. Well,
OK, I have to admit that I haven’t actually
read it from cover to cover, but it is very
accessible, and sounds very modern and is
as applicable today as it was when he wrote
it, so I really should go back and reread it.
Unexpected discoveries have played
an important part in my career
Do you believe in sudden breakthroughs?
Yes, absolutely. Serendipity and unexpected
discoveries have played an important part
in my career.
One example is the work that I’ve done
with Philippe Aghion. He and I were teach-
ing a graduate class together at UCL on
 PROFILE 11

competition, innovation, and growth. The

way we organised it was that one week he
gave a lecture on the theory and the next
week I’d give a lecture on the empirics. We
very quickly realised that we were confus-
We very quickly realised
ing the students because we were telling
them opposite things. From that experience that we were confusing
we wrote a book (Competition and Growth)
which takes the form of a dialogue between the students
an applied theorist using Schumpeterian
growth models and a microeconometrician
employing new techniques to gauge compe-
tition and entry. It was great fun to write.
Another example is the work that I did
with Melanie Luhrmann and Rodrigo Llu-
beras. Rodrigo was a PhD student of Mel-
anie’s, and he was putting together some
data for us on long-run trends in calorie
purchases recorded in the main UK house-
hold expenditure survey. We wanted it
as background to something we were
looking at. He brought us this figure
that showed that the number of
calories that households were pur-
chasing had fallen over the past few
decades, by quite a lot. We told him
it must be wrong, but after several
iterations he convinced us it was
right, and we wrote a paper that I
really like that shows how this fact is
consistent with rising obesity (life has
become more sedentary).

What makes you pessimistic about the

world, and what optimistic?
I’m basically optimistic about most things.
I think the human race is very resilient
and that at heart most people are well
intentioned. I’m constantly amazed at
the generosity and kindness that
people can show in all sorts of
unexpected situations.
However, two things have
made me somewhat more
pessimistic over recent
years. The Brexit vote was
depressing; I felt that a
monumental decision
was made for all the
wrong reasons. The way
that social media has
turned out also makes
me pessimistic - I don’t
think it’s delivered all
the things that people
hoped it would, and it
has caused quite a bit
of harm.
12 FUTURE HEALTH

The Covid-19 recession and health

James Banks, Heidi Karjalainen, and Carol Propper consider how the Covid-19
recession will influence future health

The authors
JAMES BANKS
UNIVERSITY OF MANCHESTER
AND INSTITUTE FOR
FISCAL STUDIES
HEIDI KARJALAINEN
INSTITUTE FOR
FISCAL STUDIES
DAME CAROL PROPPER
IMPERIAL COLLEGE LONDON
AND INSTITUTE FOR
FISCAL STUDIES
A
t the end of 2020, the UK
economy had shrunk by
just under 10%, there had
been over 100,000 deaths from
Covid-19 and five percent of the
labour force were unemployed.
While the vaccines offer hope that
the lockdown will ease, and the
death toll will slow and the econ-
omy pick up, we know from past
experience that major shocks to
economic activity leave long shad-
ows. Here we focus on the poten-
tial effect of the economic recession
on future health.
Intuitively, it might seem
natural to think that mortality
increases in bad economic times.
But when looking at mortality
among the whole population (and
not just those who lose a job as a
result of a recession) the evidence
is mixed, with some studies find-
ing it to decline in recessions (for
example, Ruhm 2000) or others
finding it to be either unaffected
by macroeconomic conditions or
only slightly increasing in reces-
sions. While deaths may not
change very much, many studies
 FUTURE HEALTH 13

References
Adda, J. and Fawaz, Y. (2020). The Health Toll of Import
Competition. Economic Journal, 130(630), 1501-1540.
Bellés-Obrero, C. and Vall Castelló, J. (2018).
The Business Cycle and Health. Oxford Research
Encyclopedia of Economics and Finance.
Case, A. and Deaton, A. (2015). Rising Morbidity
and Mortality in Midlife Among White Non-Hispanic
Americans in the 21st Century. Proceedings of the
National Academy of Sciences, 112(49), 15078-15083.
Case, A. and Deaton, A. (2017). Mortality and
Morbidity in the 21st Century. Brookings Papers on
Economic Activity, 397-476.
Coile, C. C., Levine, P. B. and McKnight, R. (2014).
Recessions, Older Workers, and Longevity: How
Long Are Recessions Good for Your Health?
American Economic Journal: Economic Policy,
6(3), 92-119.
Janke, K., Lee, K., Propper, C., Shields, K. and Shields,
M. A. (2020). Macroeconomic Conditions and Health
in Britain: Aggregation, Dynamics and Local Area
Heterogeneity. IZA DP No. 13091, March.
Kivimäki, M., Batty, G. D., Kawachi, I. and Steptoe, A.
(eds.) (2018). The Routledge International Handbook of
Psychosocial Epidemiology. Routledge, Abingdon, and
Routledge Handbooks Online.
Pierce, J. R. and Schott, P. K. (2020). Trade Liberalization
and Mortality: Evidence from US Counties. American
Economic Review: Insights, 2(1), 47-64.
Ruhm, C. J. (2000). Are Recessions Good for Your
Health? Quarterly Journal of Economics, 115(2), 617–650.
van den Berg, G. J., Lindeboom, M. and Portrait,
F. (2006). Economic Conditions Early in Life and
Individual Mortality. American Economic Review, 96(1),
290-302.

find that mental illness and deaths
by suicide increase in recessions,
and a review of the evidence goes
so far as to say that the deteriora-
tion of mental health in recessions
is the only well-established finding
across studies (Bellés-Obrero and
Castelló, 2018).
Mortality during the Covid-19
pandemic and associated recession
will be dominated by the direct
effects of the pandemic and its
associated effects on healthcare
provision. Any aggregate short-run
evidence from previous recessions
will be even harder to generalise
given the particular nature of the
economic and social changes expe-
rienced within the pandemic, and
the way these have fallen differen-
tially on particular groups.
However, whilst the evidence
on short-run effects of recessions
on health may be mixed, the long-
run health effects of economic
downturns have been shown to be
large and persistently negative,
and it is here that we might see
some more concrete implications
for mortality and health of the
Covid-19 pandemic.
a review… goes so far as to
say that the deterioration of
mental health in recessions
is the only well-established
finding across studies
A range of studies have found
long-run consequences of reces-
sions for mortality and morbid-
ity. Workers who experience a
recession in their fifties have been
shown to subsequently die sooner
(Coile et al. 2014). The unem-
ployment caused by the 2007-9
global financial crisis increased
the prevalence of chronic illness,
especially mental illness, in the
UK over the two years following
the onset of the recession (Janke
et al. 2020) which will then track
through to subsequent mortality,
given the link between long-run
chronic illness and mortality
(Kivimäki et al. 2018).
The long-run effects of reces-
sions have been shown to be
particularly strong on certain
groups of people according to
their situation at the time the
economic shock hits. Recessions
experienced in early childhood
can have an impact on mortal-
ity at the end of life, implying
effects that last the lifetime of the
individuals who are born during
recessions (for example, van den
Berg et al. 2006). And all current
younger generations may well
have long-lasting effects of this
pandemic given disruptions to
primary and secondary schooling,
higher education, and transitions
into the labour market, which
would all be expected to have per-
manent effects on life-time earn-
ings. In addition, those with low
incomes, insecure jobs, and poorer
living situations and family sup-
port arrangements are more likely
to have greater financial worries
and poorer mental health out-
comes in the pandemic, which are
themselves risk factors for future
poor physical health and prema-
ture mortality.
14 FUTURE HEALTH

from alcohol, drugs and suicide

Current younger generations
may well have long-lasting
effects of this pandemic
Finally, the economic effects of
the virus and the lockdown are not
evenly distributed, with strong dif-
ferential impact by occupation and
geography. To the extent that those
areas and occupational groups that
have been hit hardest by Covid-
19 do not recover, the pandemic
may lead to not just an increase in
mortality, but a further increase
in inequalities in lifespan across
people and areas. Decades of indus-
trial decline in the United States
may have led to a rise in deaths
(which have been termed ‘deaths
of despair’, Case and Deaton, 2015,
2017). The US local labour markets
with greater exposure to Chinese
import competition experienced an
economic decline that led to higher
rates of physical and mental health
problems (Adda and Fawaz, 2020)
and increased mortality, especially
from alcohol and drugs (for exam-
ple, Pierce and Schott, 2020). This
kind of structural change takes
place over several business cycles
rather than during one recession,
and its effects are distinct from the
health effects of the more tempo-
rary state of a recession.
So there will certainly be long-
term effects that depend on how
the remainder of the pandemic
and the recession plays out, the
policies that are put in place as a
result, and the nature of post-pan-
demic outcomes when it comes to
the structure and distribution of
economic activity and the nature
of our lifestyles. We will be feeling
the health consequences of Covid-
19 long after the virus itself is
under control.

Further reading

Social distancing saves lives. So do recessions:
Anne Case and Angus Deaton discuss how the
lockdown measures may actually save lives through
mechanisms that are additional to avoiding the Covid-
19-related deaths.
https://www.politico.com/news/
magazine/2020/04/02/coronavirus-economy-
reopen-deaths-balance-analysis-159248#2
Recessions and health: the long-term health
consequences of responses to the coronavirus:
James Banks, Heidi Karjalainen, and Carol Propper
summarise some of the evidence on the impact of
recessions on health.
https://www.ifs.org.uk/publications/14799
The impact of Covid-19 on chronic health in the UK:
Katharina Janke, Kevin Lee, Carol Propper, Kalvinder
Shields, and Michael Shields summarise the evidence
from a recent study about long-term effects of
recessions on chronic illness.
https://voxeu.org/article/impact-covid-19-
chronic-health-uk
Covid-19 pandemic hits mental health, especially of
the young and of women, and widens inequalities:
James Banks and Xiaowei Xu analyse initial mental
health impacts of Covid-19 and find substantial
negative impacts on mental health across
the population.
https://www.ifs.org.uk/publications/14876

How might the Covid-19 recession affect your health?
An economist explains: Christopher Ruhm talks about
the potential effects of the current recession on health.
https://news.virginia.edu/content/how-might-covid-
19-recession-affect-your-health-economist-explains
For further details and a broader perspective, see
Banks, J., Fancourt, D., and Xu, X., 2021, ‘Mental health
and the COVID-19 pandemic’, in Helliwell, J., Layard,
R., Sachs, J. and De Neve, J.-E. (eds.) World Happiness
Report 2021, 20 March 2021.
 THE ECONOMICS NETWORK 15

An update from the

Economics Network
Alvin Birdi and Caroline Elliott discuss the pivot to teaching online
and the Economics Network’s response

The authors
ALVIN BIRDI
DIRECTOR OF THE ECONOMICS
NETWORK AND UNIVERSITY
OF BRISTOL

CAROLINE ELLIOTT
DEPUTY DIRECTOR OF THE
ECONOMICS NETWORK AND
THE UNIVERSITY OF WARWICK

I
n the July 2020 newsletter,
we wrote about the move to
predominantly online teaching
and assessment. In the months
that have followed, academics
have worked long hours to rede-
sign teaching and assessment
materials appropriately for online
or blended delivery. Few will
have had time to reflect critically
on the collective achievement of
these developments.
We hope that in the coming
months there will be time for
reflection on the nature of these
individual and departmental-level
successes. There include new com-
petencies in the additional tech-
nologies required to prepare online
teaching materials, to make large
and small online classes engaging
and interactive, as well as recon-
ceiving assessment to work online.
The Economics Network has
been busy supporting colleagues
across the UK and beyond in what
has been a profound rupture not
just to teaching, learning, and
assessment, but also in student
support and sense of belonging.
Here we take stock of our activities
supporting academics in this great
online pivot over the past year.
For many, the Economics Net-
work is synonymous with the
training opportunities we provide,
predominantly – but not exclu-
sively – for economists in the early
stages of their academic careers.
Until 2020 this training had taken
place in face-to-face workshops.
Early last summer we recognised
that supporting colleagues with
the move to online teaching and
learning would itself need to be
facilitated online. We took the
opportunity to recast these work-
shops, both as online training and
as real-time demonstrations of
how engagement can be fostered in
online environments.
We began the summer with our
first online symposium, consisting
of four themed live events using a
Some 450 delegates
attended these sessions,
from 25 countries
variety of online tools, with addi-
tional asynchronous materials pro-
vided to participants in advance
and after sessions. The themes
covered Engaging Students and
Academics with Online Learn-
ing, Teaching with Data Online,
Teaching Economics with Excel
Online and Adaptable Assessment.
Some 450 delegates attended these
sessions, from 25 countries, and
feedback was very positive. Mate-
rials from the symposium can be
16 THE ECONOMICS NETWORK

accessed from the Economics Net-

work website.
The Early Career Academic
(ECA) and Graduate Teaching
Assistant (GTA) workshops fol-
lowed quickly after this symposium
in early autumn 2020, and again
took place virtually. There were 20
ECA attendees and 72 GTA attend-
ees with an additional 20 attendees
for the extra module offered to
experienced GTAs who had previ-
ously not taught online. Again, the
feedback was very appreciative,
and attendance healthy both for the
core modules and the optional mod-
ules on Games and Experiments,
Creating Learning Communities,
Inclusive Teaching and Facilitating
Effective Group Work.
We welcomed seven new Asso-
ciates to the Network in January
2021, from the universities of
East Anglia, Loughborough, Not-
tingham Trent, Portsmouth, Stir-
ling, Strathclyde and Warwick.
These new recruits join existing
associates to make up our 51 asso-
ciates around the UK. Together
with a senior Executive Board of
twelve members, the Network’s
activities are undertaken by a
large number of contributors, to
whom we are always grateful. We
have been striving to make the
Network increasingly diverse and
are pleased that contributors and
senior staff are now relatively We hope to hold this year’s
well represented across various DEE conference from September
dimensions, including gender, 1st-3rd at Heriot-Watt University,
country of birth, ethnicity, and potentially incorporating a hybrid
These developments may
university type. mode of delivery that includes both result in longer-term shifts in
Our associates and Executive face-to-face and online elements. economics teaching
work across six workstreams However, depending on circum-
that represent the breadth of our stances, we may have to follow
activities. As well as the Training the lead of conferences such as the
group, there are groups devoted RES and SES, earlier in the year
to research and data analysis; than ours, and move fully online.
publications including the Eco- Unfortunately, it seems likely that
nomics Network Handbook, the the hopes of some Executive mem-
International Review of Econom- bers for a ceilidh after the confer-
ics Education, and the Economic ence dinner will be dashed. But as
Review magazine aimed at A-level always, we expect the conference
students; website and communica- to be as welcoming, supportive,
tions; recruitment; and conferences and productive for the teaching
and symposia encompassing the community as in previous years.
biennial Developments in Econom- We have been pleasantly sur-
ics Education (DEE) Conference. prised by the sharp rise in the

number of colleagues willing to
share their experiences of the move
to online teaching, learning, and
assessment by writing advice for
others, which we have published
as Teaching Case Studies on the
Economics Network website. Since
the huge success of ‘Assessment in
the Time of Pandemic: A Panic-free
Guide’, written by Tim Burnett and
Stefania Paredes Fuentes and pub-
lished on the website in June 2020,
we have published a further 29
case studies, making this the busi-
est year for the publication of case
studies. We are incredibly grateful
for everyone who has made time
to contribute a case study despite
their other work pressures.
We are very aware that univer-
sities, including their Economics
Many of us have discovered
some advantages of online
teaching
Departments, have faced finan-
cial uncertainty in the current
academic year. This has given
rise to delays in receiving annual
subscriptions from contributing
departments, and some depart-
ments struggling to cover the cost
of their subscription. Given the
savings made from having online
rather than face-to-face training
workshops, we are temporarily
offering lower departmental sub-
scription costs to those depart-
ments needing assistance. Please
contact Ashley Lait, the Economics
Network Manager, for details.
Looking to the future, the Eco-
nomics Network has started work-
ing closely with the Education
Committee of the European Eco-
nomic Association to ensure that
we provide complementary support
to Economics colleagues across
Europe. Similarly, we are working
with the RES Education Com-
mittee and exploring the kinds of
support that would be welcomed
by more experienced teaching
staff. We are also linking up with
the employment-focused site Inom-
ics, so that both organisations can
provide more comprehensive infor-
mation to academic economists
thinking about their careers. All
of these new liaisons have occa-
sioned a redesign and update of
our website to ensure greater ease
of navigation around a richer set
of resources, and a focus on more
up-to-date and topical materials as
the pandemic begins to wane.
Inevitably, there has been a
large opportunity cost in terms of
research effort and other activities
that this vast increase in teaching
workload has imposed on aca-
demic and professional staff. But
we end this update on our activ-
THE ECONOMICS NETWORK 17
ities by noting that this intense
period of effort has resulted in a
number of ways of teaching we
hope will be articulated, evalu-
ated, consolidated, and retained as
the pandemic eases.
For example, many of us have
discovered some advantages
of online teaching, such as a
reduced nervousness of students
giving presentations online,
and an increased willingness to
ask and respond to questions
using the ‘chat’ options (even if
they can be reluctant to turn on
their cameras). We have seen a
move towards more applied and
research-based assessments, and
a reduction in those that rely
heavily on “memory-work”. There
is also hope that teaching prepa-
ration may be somewhat easier
for the forthcoming academic
year, given banks of pre-recorded
lecture materials that can be
re-used or adapted, especially
where they were designed with
future use in mind.
We are hopeful that these devel-
opments may result in longer-
term shifts in economics teaching
towards more active modes of
learning, such as the flipped-class-
room approach, and away from
more inactive modes such as the
delivery of lectures, where students
attend with little prior knowledge
of the topic to be covered.
Certainly, in the Economics
Network, though we have sorely
missed face-to-face interaction
with our colleagues and the wider
teaching community, we are con-
fident that training will always
retain large elements of the new
modes of teaching and learning
that we have learned over the
past year.
Visit www.economicsnetwork.ac.uk 
to access Economics Network
resources and find out more about
its events and other activities. You
can also sign up on the website to
receive the Network’s newsletter,
where a modified version of this
article will appear.
18 COMMENT
Comment and debate
Is economics always politics?
R
The author oger Backhouse’s and James
Forder’s defence of History
JAN TOPOROWSKI of Economic Thought in the
PROFESSOR OF ECONOMICS last Newsletter (‘Rediscovering
AND FINANCE, SOAS the history of economic thought’,
UNIVERSITY OF LONDON issue 192, January 2021) would be
stronger if it recognised the politi-
cal factor in determining which the-
ories are academically respectable,
and hence worthy of canonization,
and which theories are deemed to
be too idiosyncratic to win entry
to textbooks. As Gunnar Myrdal
observed in The Political Element
in the Development of Economic
Theory, ‘We must look upon the
majority of modern economic doc-
trines as modified reminiscences
of very old political thinking…
political speculation has permeated
economics from the very beginning’.
Myrdal went further. He pointed
out that economics has always been
a political enterprise to influence
government policy.
Attempts to suppress this polit-
ical aspect of economics, accord-
ing to Myrdal, lead to confusion
between normative and positive
economics that makes econom-
ics unscientific and, ultimately,
defeats the legitimacy of economic
argument: ‘expressing political
attitudes only through the medium
of purportedly objective arguments
and scientific theories is probably
in the long run highly injurious to
the actual policy that one wishes
Attempts to suppress this political aspect of economics, according
to Myrdal, lead to confusion between normative and positive
economics that makes economics unscientific
to support. Quasi-scientific ration-
alisation of a political endeavour
may be an effective propaganda
weapon; yet… is in a democratic
setting almost always inhibitory
and disintegrating.’
A result of this confusion,
according to Myrdal, is that eco-
nomics does not progress from one
theory to a better theory: ‘In eco-
nomics, on the contrary, all doc-
trines live on persistently.’
Nearly a century later, Myrdal’s
view remains worthy of consid-
eration. Once we recognize that
economic theories rise to pre-em-
inence because they meet a par-
ticular political conjuncture, the
case for the history of economic
thought, to pick up ideas that
lost their political conjuncture,
or perhaps never met a congenial
one, becomes much stronger. We
should not delude ourselves that
only logic and evidence have elim-
inated the theories of the past.
Those who know only the latest
fad in economics know little of
economics. And I wonder if the
current embarrassment of our
profession about the history of
economic thought arises because
any historical consideration of the
most fundamental economic doc-
trines, as opposed to mere chron-
ological listing, exposes the origin
of those doctrines not in economics
but in politics.

Readers with views on this topic are invited to write to the Editor.
The authors reply…
The authors
ROGER BACKHOUSE
UNIVERSITY OF There is a strong case to be made that the
BIRMINGHAM AND
ERASMUS UNIVERSITY
political element more often enters in the
ROTTERDAM way concepts are used rather than being
JAMES FORDER implicit in the techniques themselves
BALLIOL COLLEGE, OXFORD
J
an Toporowski is quite right
that more than logic and
evidence determine fashions
as to economic theory, and that
the political element is not to be
ignored. This has always been the
case. Our aim, though, was not to
reassess that matter, but to iden-
tify characteristics of the state
of economics today that make
the study of the history of eco-
nomic thought potentially more
interesting and useful to econo-
mists than it was fifty years ago.
That case can be made without
reference to the political associa-
tions of various theories.
That, of course, does not
make Toporowski’s question
uninteresting. However, eco-
nomics has changed a lot since
Myrdal wrote his 1930 book.
The highly technical economic
concepts that dominate today’s
economics are unlikely to be val-
ue-free (they are human creations
after all) but there is a strong
case to be made that the political
element more often enters in the
way concepts are used rather
than being implicit in the tech-
niques themselves.
Take the theory of general com-
petitive equilibrium. In the 1930s
COMMENT 19
this had a leftish tinge, being
used by Oskar Lange and others
to construct arguments for market
socialism. Today some economists
see it as justifying free-market
policy while others argue that it
shows that the conditions needed
for an efficient perfectly compet-
itive economy cannot possibly be
satisfied in the real world. The
theory of general competitive
equilibrium has no politics of its
own; it is a technique that is used
to support the political positions
of those who use it, which span
the political spectrum. Another
example comes from views of
inflation in the 1950s and 1960s.
Some saw the problem in terms of
excess demand, others in a vari-
ety of ‘cost-push’ factors. There
was no doubt a political element
to that. But of more interest,
within the latter group, there is
a distinction between the view,
predominant amongst the British
left, that tended to blame trade
unions, and their counterparts in
the United States who were much
more inclined to see the problem
in business practice and oligopoly
pricing. Toporowski’s question is
important, but we do not see it as
having a simple answer.
20 RES COMMITTEES
The Women’s Committee
Hiring women in economics – what works
The Women’s Committee advise on practical steps
The authors
MARINA DELLA GIUSTA
UNIVERSITY OF READING
ALMUDENA SEVILLA
UNIVERSITY COLLEGE LONDON
SARAH SMITH
UNIVERSITY OF BRISTOL
JO SWAFFIELD
UNIVERSITY OF YORK
D
espite decades of effort to
increase the representation
of women among academic
economists, it remains low and
progress limited. Female rep-
resentation in economics is closer
to hard sciences, and well below
other social sciences, where more
than half of academics are women
(Gamage et al. 2020). A burgeon-
ing empirical literature identifies
challenges facing women in eco-
nomics; here we describe recruit-
ment approaches that work.
This responds to the need to
improve diversity, key to the
2019-2023 RES strategy. It also
responds to increasing requests
to the Women’s Committee Chair
from those with hiring responsi-
bilities, about how to best attract
female economists. It builds on
our experience and on decades
of research. Recruitment is only
the first step; future articles
will cover salary negotiations
and promotions.
Wide dissemination
Use diversity head-hunters and
female networks to spread the
advert. The RES Women’s Com-
mittee, CSWEP, and WINECON
are all good places.
A meaningful statement
Tailor the statement to the post
and university, with enough detail
to make it credible. Provide fig-
ures, and photos of diversity in
the advert, to show the ‘face’ of
the department you are and want
to become; show how women are
represented in key positions, such
as a female head of department, or
female research or teaching com-
mittee chairs; state a willingness
to consider part-time appoint-
ments or job sharing; use inclusive
and welcoming language; use AI
algorithms and draw on a diverse
pool of colleagues to edit the
advert; include a core institutional
EDI statement in the job spec, and
a department commitment, such
as a website statement, Athena
SWAN award, etc.
Data
Collect and look at data at each
stage, on the share of women
among applicants, among inter-
viewees, and among offers and
acceptances, to shed light on
where issues may be arising.
Code of conduct in seminars
Job market seminars are key to
recruitment. Recent evidence shows
that women are asked more ques-
tions – and more patronising and
hostile questions – than men. Some
departments have introduced sem-
inar rules: give speakers uninter-
rupted time at the start, eliminate
cross-chat, and stop participants
from dominating the questions.
A two-step approach
One approach that we have found to
work: select the panel to be diverse
first, and then look at the spe-
cific research area. Anyone in the
department should be able to judge
the candidate overall, since we hire
colleagues, not job market papers.
Diversity training
All panel members should under-
take diversity training, to become
aware of conscious and unconscious
biases and how to overcome them.
Transparency
Share best practices in a recruit-
ment handbook. Avoid informal
selection mechanisms such as
hiring dinners. Monitor time spent
discussing each candidate, and
language used to describe the per-
ceived advantages and drawbacks
of potential hires.
Strategic thinking
Being disorganized can mean
over-using informal networks
and shortcuts (meaningless gen-
der-equality statements, or a token
female on a panel). A diversity
champion or working group can
lead on strategic change.
References
Gamage, D. K., Sevilla, A. and Smith,
S. (2020). Women in economics: a
UK perspective. Oxford Review of
Economic Policy, 36(4), 962-982.
For the RES strategy see
https://www.res.org.uk/about/
strategy.html

The Economic Journal
An update on a year in the life of the Economic Journal
The authors
THE EDITORS
THE ECONOMIC JOURNAL
I
n 2020, the Economic
Journal received
almost two thousand
submissions, the highest
ever. The headline accept-
ance rate for 2020 was
6%. As in recent years,
about a quarter of sub-
missions came from North
America, less than a fifth
from the United Kingdom,
and about two-fifths from
the rest of Europe.
In more detail, the
total number of submis-
sions for 2020 was 1,994.
This is up from 1,722 in
2019. The 2019 intro-
duction of pre-accept-
ance replication checks
resulted in a slight delay
to acceptance decisions
being filed by the editors,
and hence the headline
2020 acceptance rate of
6% is slightly inflated.
The adjusted acceptance
rate for 2020 is 4%.
The Journal continues
to benefit from dedicated
referees and Associate
Editors who deliver
high-quality and timely
reports, with 92% return-
ing their reports within
three months in 2020.
Decision turnaround times
for that year were still
slower than we would like,
partly due to the volume
of submissions the Jour-
nal has received in recent
years. The rate of desk
reject decisions in 2020
was slightly lower than
in recent years, at 48%.
For detailed turnaround
data, please see the online
version of this report.
The Journal continues
to award prizes for excep-
tional referee reports,
and two prizes for excep-
tional papers. The 2020
winners of the Austin
Robinson Memorial Prize
and the Royal Economic
Society Prize will be
announced at the RES
Conference in April 2021
and reported in the next
issue of this newsletter.
(For the 2019 winners,
see the July 2020 issue of
the newsletter, available
on the RES website.)
In July 2020, the
Journal introduced a
new short paper format,
broadly similar to Amer-
ican Economic Review:
Insights (fewer than
6,000 words, no more
than five exhibits). Short
papers are held to the
same quality standards
as regular submissions,
and the same edito-
rial decision processes
in terms of refereeing
apply. In 2020, 119 short
paper submissions were
received, and four were
returned for revision.
Incoming and outgo-
ing Managing Editors
overlap, where possible,
to allow for a smooth
transition. Heski Bar-
Isaac joined the board in
March 2020 and Estelle
Cantillon left the board
in September 2020.
Steffen Huck joined the
RES JOURNALS 21
full report for 2020 was
written, Franck Portier
was appointed a new
Joint Managing Editor,
from 8 February 2021.)
1,994 Ethics guidelines for
authors, reviewers, and
editors continue to be
The total number adopted to ensure that
of submissions for publication best practice
2020. This is up from is upheld. The Journal’s
1,722 in 2019 Data Editor, Joan Llull,
continues to coordinate
pre-acceptance reproduc-
ibility checks in line with
top journals in the field. In
2020 the pool of research
assistants conducting the
checks was increased, to
4% ensure that the team had
varied skills and to man-
The adjusted age the workload.
The Journal is cur-
acceptance rate of
rently ranked ninth by
submissions for 2020 Google Scholar. It con-
tinues to raise its profile
on social media, with
Twitter followers increas-
ing by 4,698 in 2020 and
overall Twitter followers
exceeding 14,000 as of 21
711k January this year. The
Journal continues to per-
form well on alternative
Twitter impressions measure of impact, with
in 2020 13 being the average Alt-
metric score for articles
board in July 2020 and published in 2020. The
Rachel Kranton left the Journal generated 711K
board in June 2020. The Twitter impressions in
editors would like to 2020, compared with
thank Estelle Cantillon 515K in 2019.
and Rachel Kranton for
their service and com-
mitment to the Journal.
Marco Manacorda joined For the full report, on which
the board as the Jour- this summary is based, see:
nal’s ninth Managing https://www.res.org.uk/
Editor in February 2020. resources-page/ej-annual-
(Editor’s note: after the report-2020-pdf.html
22 OBITUARIES
Obituary: Domenico Mario Nuti
O
The authors n December 22, 2020
Domenico Mario Nuti, Pro-
JOSEPH HALEVI fessor of Economics (retired
MACQUARIE UNIVERSITY since 2010) at La Sapienza Univer-
sity of Rome, died. This is a pro-
PETER KRIESLER found loss that leaves a great void.
UNIVERSITY OF NEW Nuti was born in the Tuscan city
SOUTH WALES of Arezzo on August 16, 1937 and
in 1962 graduated in law from La
Sapienza. That year (and 1963) he
moved to Warsaw as a fellow of the
Polish Academy of Sciences, study-
ing with Michal Kalecki and Oskar
Lange. From Warsaw he moved
to Cambridge, where in 1970 he
obtained a PhD in economics with
Maurice Dobb and Nicholas Kaldor.
From 1965 to 1979, Nuti was
a Fellow of King’s College, Cam-
bridge, and lecturer in the Faculty
of Economics of the University of
Cambridge. From 1980 to 1982, he
was Professor and Director of the
Centre for Russian and Eastern
European Studies at the Univer-
sity of Birmingham. During the
1980s, Nuti became full Professor
at the University of Siena and the
European University Institute of
Fiesole, near Florence. In 1993 he
was appointed to the Chair of Com-
parative Economic Systems at the
Sapienza University of Rome until
his retirement. Until 2005, Nuti
was also Visiting Professor at the
London Business School.
It was at Cambridge that Mario
Nuti began his journey as an aca-
demic, immediately establishing
himself as a theorist of the highest
quality, able to place his ideas in
relation to their historical and
political context. His writings cov-
ered a wide range of theoretical
issues, from the incentive system
and the choice of techniques in
Soviet industry, to the implications
of capital theory debates for capi-
talist and socialist systems, to the
critique of the theoretical Kaldor/
Mirrlees growth model, to the anal-
ysis of incomes policies, as well as
important contributions to under-
standing the determinants of the
class distribution of income.
In 1974, editing the essays of
the Russian mathematical econo-
mist V. K. Dmitriev (1868–1913)
for Cambridge University Press,
he wrote a masterful introductory
essay in which theoretical analysis
and the history of economic thought
are harmoniously blended.
Nuti’s originality and strengths
were the result of his Marxian, his-
torical, and legal backgrounds cou-
pled with the intellectual domina-
tion of the ruling theories about the
market, as well as a deep knowledge
of the institutional, political, and
ideological mechanisms that under-
lay the economies of Eastern Europe
and the USSR. Indeed, Mario Nuti
became one of the foremost scholars
of the economics of socialism and of
the post-socialist transitions.
The events of 1989-91 catapulted
him into the Commission of the
European Union as the highest
expert on those countries, a commit-
ment that lasted for the next two
decades. In December 1989, he was
invited to Brussels as an adviser to
DG-II (then division for economic
and monetary affairs) as head of
relations with economies in transi-
tion. As a result, a long and intense
phase followed during which Nuti
produced many reports and essays,
both on specific problems and
countries, and on issues of general
reflection. Mario Nuti addressed in
a most original way both the crisis
of the centrally-planned economies
and the problems of the economics
of transition, and his work became
a necessary reference for the study
of those countries.
 NEWS 23

News…

News from
Discover
Economics

Discover Econom-
ics has been busy!
During LGBT History
month in February,
we ran a campaign
showcasing LBGT
economists working
in business, aca-
demia, and the pub-
lic sector. We also
launched our video
competition for the
Young Economic
Summit. Students in
As briefly mentioned ety of topics, including year 10, 11, and 13
in the Economic Jour- a lunchtime discussion will have an oppor-
nal report on page 21, between Sir Angus Dea- tunity to work with
the Journal editors are A new feature at ton and Sir Tim Besley on economists from
delighted to announce this year’s RES the Farewell Letter from McKinsey and the
the appointment of Conference will be America published in this Health Foundation
Franck Portier as a new issue. For details, see the and compete against
Joint Managing Editor. Lunchtime Chats conference website. other future econo-
He joined on 8 February mists at the final in
2021. Franck is a Pro- Hamburg. Finally, for
fessor of Economics at This year’s RES Confer- International Wom-
University College Lon- mans (University of ence will be virtual, and en’s Day, we hosted
don, and brings exper- Cambridge), and Michal we have commissioned an a podcast with Dame
tise in macroeconomics, Kolesar (Princeton Uni- exciting interactive plat- Rachel Griffith, who
with a focus on applied versity) have joined The form to host the event. told us about her
and theoretical business Econometrics Journal as If you have booked, the unorthodox route
cycle analysis. Associate Editors, from 1 platform will be available into economics. We
January 2021. They will two weeks before the con- found it very inspir-
bring expertise to the ference for you to create ing and we hope
The Econometrics Jour- Journal across a range of your own profile and that lots more young
nal is happy to report subfields of econometrics. build your own bespoke women follow in
that Dacheng Xiu (Uni- agenda for Conference. Rachel’s footsteps.
versity of Chicago), Dan- Once live, the platform
iel Wilhelm (University A new feature at this will host all the sessions For more informa-
College London), Demian year’s RES Conference and our virtual exhi- tion about Discover
Pouzo (University of will be Lunchtime Chats, bition, and you will be Economics visit
California, Berkeley), an innovation of Ricardo able to schedule time to www.discovereco-
Drew Creal (University Reis, the Conference Pro- meet with colleagues and nomics.co.uk
of Notre Dame), Marine gramme Chair for 2021. peers. We look forward to
Carrasco (Université de These informal conver- a successful and stimu-
Montréal), Koen Joch- sations will cover a vari- lating event.
24 CONFERENCES AND EVENTS

Events

RES Annual Conference 2021

The online 2021 RES Annual Conference
will be held on 12-14 April 2021. The Pro-
gramme Committee has put together a full
programme for the three days, including
three keynotes and two Past President
Addresses, three new lunchtime talks, as
well as the usual mix of special and general
sessions. You can view the programme and
book via the Conference website.

Conference on Measuring
Prices and Welfare
This conference, organised jointly
by the Centre for Microdata
Methods and Practice and the
Economic and Statistics Working
Group, will take place on Zoom
on 28-29 April 2021. The confer-
ence will examine the problems
involved in producing measures
of price change, quantity change,
and changes in welfare. It will
explore some of the issues aris-
ing from the availability of new
sources of data, such as those
from scanners, as well as tradi-
tional problems like measuring
the price of housing. Kevin Fox
of the University of New South
Wales will give a keynote lecture
on “Price Index Measurement
during Pandemics: What have we
learnt from Covid-19?”. See the
Cemmap website for details.
Symposium of Junior
Researchers
This year’s Symposium of Junior
Researchers will take place virtually
on Tuesday 18 May 2021 and will be
hosted by students at Queen’s Uni-
versity Belfast. The Student Organ-
ising Committee has been working
hard to create a diverse and inter-
esting programme for the event. We
highly recommend PhD students
mark the date in their diaries.
Dame Carol Propper commented:
“The Symposium is a fantastic
opportunity for PhD students to
come together and support one
another through discussion and
peer review. Students will have
the opportunity to hear from key-
notes and share opinions and ideas
around papers submitted. Senior
academics will also be on hand to
lend their experience and insight. I
am really looking forward to wel-
coming you to the event and hear-
ing about the exciting research you
are doing.”
Macro-finance Conference
in Money, Liquidity, and
Financial Stability
The annual Macro-finance confer-
ence is hosted by Oxford Saïd and
the Risk Center at ETH Zürich. This
year’s conference will be held 9-10
July 2021, at Saïd Business School,
University of Oxford. The keynote
speakers are Herakles Polemar-
chakis (University of Warwick) and
Harald Uhlig (University of Chi-
cago); the invited speakers are Edu-
ardo Davila (Yale University) and
Tim Eisert (Erasmus School of Eco-
nomics). The organisers are Hans
Gersbach, Oren Sussman, Dimitrios
Tsomocos, and Xuan Wang. The call
for papers closes on 15 April 2021.

To contribute to the newsletter In the next issue

If you have an idea for a feature, details of an event, a proposal
for an obituary, or would like to contribute a Letter to the The Conference issue:
Editor, please write to Jon Temple at jon.temple@zohomail.eu a report on the
and cc your message to resnews@res.org.uk RES Conference 2021
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