Donald Winch's scientific contributions

... It is not surprising, therefore, that the interwar Treasury showed very little enthusiasm for ideas for an 'Economic General Staff' attached to the Cabinet Office. 75 Lloyd George's talk of 'inflation' as a means of reducing unemployment must have confirmed Treasury officials in their belief in the advantages of an independent central bank, preferably one whose independence from party political pressures was reinforced by an overriding commitment to maintaining a fixed exchange rate, a goal achieved in 1925 when the then Chancellor of the Exchequer, Churchill, was persuaded that the time was ripe for Britain to return to the gold standard. 76 It also seems to have been in reaction to the Gairloch episode that the Treasury deployed its famous 'view' that 'money taken for government purposes is money taken away from trade, and borrowing will thus tend to depress trade and increase unemployment' (the 1922 version) or that 'very little additional employment and no permanent employment can in fact and as a general rule be created by state borrowing and state expenditure' (the 1929 version). ...

... I do not wish to imply that Barber was the first to make a careful study of the role of economists as policy advisors. See, for example,Howson and Winch (1977). 2 Joseph Dorfman's five-volume The Economic Mind in American Civilization(1946)(1947)(1948)(1949)(1950)(1951)(1952)(1953)(1954)(1955)(1956)(1957)(1958)(1959) is an exception here, of course, but it did not spawn imitators. ...

... In his later historical survey The Theory of Economic Policy in English Classical Political 1 Robbins to Iris Gardiner, 24 June 1924 (cited by Howson 2004, 417) 2 For a more detailed account of Robbins' involvement as a political economist, see Howson and Winch (1977), O'Brien (1988), Wright (1989), Howson and Moggridge (1990), Howson (2004), Masini (2009), Scarantino (2009, Oliveira and Suprinyak (2016 (Robbins 1978, 176-177). ...

... So Hans went to see Colin Clark, who agreed to take him on. Clark was not a trained economist (he had studied chemistry), though he worked briefly for the Economic Advisory Council on statistics of trade and employment and had helped Richard Kahn with his work on the employment multiplier (Howson and Winch, 1977, p. 25, 36n, 72, 84–5; Moggridge, 1992, p. 535). Keynes brought him to Cambridge in 1931 as a lecturer in economic statistics. ...