17
The achievements of a cheerful economist
John Toye
Youth, Cambridge and Kenya
Richard Jolly, born in the summer of 1934, was the only son of Arthur Jolly and his wife Flora Doris (nee Leaver) in Hove, Sussex. His father, an accountant, had settled there just before the First World War and started a successful accountancy partnership. Both parents were religious, though in different degrees. Arthur was treasurer of the local English Presbyterian Church for many years, a man of strong practical faith and conviction. His forte was voluntary youth and community work. The Borough of Hove recognised his lifetime of public-spirited activity by making him an Honorary Citizen. Flora was a keen supporter of Frank Buchman’s Oxford Group (re-named the Movement for Moral Re-armament in 1938) that emphasised the need for personal change, and which focused its recruitment on the wealthy and famous.[1]
Richard enjoyed only six years of childhood in the large family house in Wilbury Gardens. The fear of an imminent German invasion led his parents to despatch him and his two sisters to foster homes in Canada in September 1940, where he stayed until early 1945. On return, he was enrolled at Brighton College, not then in one of its most academically impressive phases, where after school certificate levels he specialised in mathematics and physics. Receiving excellent tuition in small classes, he passed his examinations at Advanced and Scholarship level. He missed the Cambridge scholarship examinations because of illness (encephalitis), but gained admission to Magdelene College, where a distant cousin, A. S. Ramsey, had been a Fellow in mathematics.[2] Richard found the College to be friendly and comfortable and spent his first year there doing Part I of the Mathematical Tripos, under the supervision of Dennis Babbage.
Although feeling rather isolated in his maths studies, he found sociability in the Cambridge Inter-collegiate Christian Union (CICU), a student club whose mission it is to bring the good news of the gospel to fellow Cambridge students. It was a CICU friend who suggested to Richard that he considered switching from maths to Economics, pointing out to him Marshall’s opening pronouncement that “the two great forming agencies of the world’s history have been the religious and the economic”.[3] Before deciding to switch, Richard spent the summer of 1954 reading Economic Analysis by Kenneth Boulding, an economist who was also a lifelong Quaker.
Michael Farrell supervised Richard’s work for Part II of the Economics Tripos. Farrell was an economic theorist and econometrician whose main research focus was the efficiency of the firm. His work was neo-classical in its approach and therefore uncongenial to the self-identified disciples of Keynes who at that time dominated the Faculty of Economics.[4] Richard was little aware of these professional differences and, under Farrell’s tuition, became for a while as true a believer in neo-classical economics as he was in evangelical religion. He graduated with first class honours in 1956.
At that time, conscription was still in place in the UK, so Richard still faced the prospect of two years of National Service in the armed forces. He spent the Christmas of 1955 reading the arguments for and against pacifism, finally opting for entry as a medical non-combatant. He wrote to the War Office enquiring how many medical non-combatants were currently enlisted in the British army and received the surprising reply that there were none. So he changed his mind and applied for registration as a conscientious objector. At the tribunal hearing in Fulham in 1956, he heard several previous applications for CO status dismissed on the grounds that the applicants had not offered to enlist as medical non-combatants. After his own application had been approved, Richard challenged the panel judges about the grounds for their refusal of the preceding applications, flourishing the letter from the War Office stating that there were no medical non-combatants in the army. This information produced consternation in court, since the judges seemed to know nothing of this. Richard’s eyes were opened to the fallibility of officialdom. It was something of a political awakening for him.
Separately from his application for CO status, Richard had been exploring the possibility of going to Kenya to work for the colonial Ministry of Community Development and Rehabilitation. The CO tribunal approved this occupation as an appropriate alternative to military conscription. He was fortunate in not being assigned to the Rehabilitation wing of the ministry, which was dealing with the re-integration of former Mau Mau guerrillas, and being sent to the Community Development wing, where he first learned Kiswahili. He was then posted as Community Development Officer to Baringo district in Rift Valley province, one of Kenya’s more underdeveloped districts, especially in the matter of school provision. One of the Community Development Assistants, Grace Mahbub, pointed out that almost all of the colonial services were targeted on men, while women did most of the actual work. Richard concentrated his efforts on working with women, for which he earned the local sobriquet, Bwana ya Wanawake (‘man of the women’) – one that may have been misinterpreted in the late 1950s but can now be worn with pride.
His two years in Baringo district were formative for three main reasons. First, they were the time when he lost his Christian beliefs. At the start, he found friends in the African Inland Mission: by the end, he came to see them as operating inside their own cultural bubble and unable, because of their own religious doctrines, to connect properly with the people whom they had come to Kenya to serve. Second, Baringo was his first face to face exposure with problems of development, which previously he had only read about in Arthur Lewis’s The Theory of Economic Growth (1955).[5] Third, the disparity between the economics that he had learned and lives of the people of Baringo was sufficient to make him eager to go on to further study in the hope of bringing academic and practical knowledge a little closer to each other. At the same time, his loss of Christian faith also made him equally suspicious of other kinds of fundamentalism, such as the various closed belief systems to be found lurking in economics and social science.
Yale and after
Michael Farrell had originally advised Richard to apply for postgraduate entry to the University of Chicago, where Farrell had worked in the Cowles Commission in 1951-3.[6] Because of Baringo’s rudimentary postal service – with the mail still brought by runner - the Chicago application forms arrived after the submission deadline, and meanwhile Richard had applied to and been accepted by Yale University. Before leaving for Yale, Richard worked as Farrell’s temporary research assistant on an investigation into the determinants of labour productivity in coal mining. They used a large data set (818 mines) and 77 independent variables for econometric testing, running regressions on the early computer EDSAC 2, but succeeding in explaining about half of the productivity differences. Richard at the time took this to be a poor result, which threw doubt on the usefulness of econometric methods – a view that he now considers to have been a serious professional misjudgement, a sign of youthful inexperience.
In his first year at Yale, Richard completed his MA successfully, but felt disappointed with the courses on economic development that were on offer. He applied for doctoral studies at Nuffield College, Oxford, but was too late and Norman Chester, then Warden, turned him down. The situation at Yale then changed for the better for two reasons. First, during his second year he was found an attractive sinecure, which paid his fees and required him only to organise occasional visits to the university by high profile personalities. One of these was the New York Times journalist Herbert Matthews, who had interviewed Fidel Castro in the Sierra Maestra in 1957.[7]
The second and more important reason why the Yale experience improved was the arrival in 1961 of Dudley Seers, someone who was to play a major role in shaping the first half of Richard’s career. Dudley came to Yale fresh from four years working at the UN Economic Commission for Latin America, alongside Raul Prebisch and Osvaldo Sunkel. Dudley brought to Yale his discovery of ECLA’s ‘structuralism’. This was not so much a theory as an approach to the analysis of development. Rather than relying on imported models derived from the developed countries’ experiences, which could be exceptional, the structuralist approach analysed the key structural features of the country and sought to understand their implications for its development prospects.[8]
Dudley, by training a statistician, brought a breath of realism to economic statistics, and had a maverick view of poverty indices. To measure development he told the class of startled Yale graduates, “I prefer the shoe index”. His proposed index would use data on how many people were barefoot, how many had on their feet soles cut from car tyres, how many wore Bata imports, how many were leather shod and how many flaunted fancy footwear. The interesting point, Dudley explained, was the number and variety of shoes possessed by the top few percent of the population – not only brown and black ones but specialist shoes like riding boots, tennis plimsolls and dancing pumps. This was long before Imelda Marcos’s hoard of nearly three thousand pairs of designer label shoes was revealed.[9] It was a typical Dudley provocation, but it rang a bell with Richard.
Richard had already visited Cuba twice when Dudley asked him in his third year to join a research project that he was leading on the economic and social aspects of the Cuban revolution. He had negotiated access for this project through his former ECLA colleague, Regino Boti, then a Cuban economics minister. Dudley thought that the Castro revolution was “one of the most important political developments in [the twentieth] century” (Seers 1964: xi). He wanted to know whether the ECLA goals of faster economic growth and social reform could indeed be achieved by means of the power of revolutionary nationalism. He assembled a small team, including Richard, Andres Bianchi of Chile, also doing graduate studies at Yale, and Max Nolff. Together they researched in Cuba in August and September 1962.
Richard set to work on the Cuban education sector. What he produced was less of a chapter that a small monograph, running to over one hundred pages of the subsequent edited book. The economic aspects of education were in the foreground, because of their relevance for other poor Latin American countries. There are good descriptions of the initial conditions of Cuban education infrastructure and the new regime’s changes to primary school enrolment, secondary teaching and university-level education, plus the massive adult literacy campaign. Yet the statistics that could be assembled were not sufficiently detailed or comprehensive to enable the net benefits of the additional investment in education to be estimated. In any case, both Richard and Dudley were clear that investment in education might not be sufficient to relax the constraints holding back Cuban agriculture and industry.
In a separate appendix, Richard expressed his distaste for the Marxist-Leninist political ideas that were being propagated through the education system. At the same time, he acknowledged that there was “more than a touch of relevance in the message: much of what is emphasised about economic imperialism, land reform and the privileges of the rich, for example, already finds a ready market in Latin America” (Seers 1964: 347). Perhaps it was this comment that prompted a hundred critical reviews in the newspapers of the southern states of the US – although the book went on to sell five thousand copies.
During his time at Yale, Richard met many people, as well as Dudley, who were to be part of his professional future. They included Gerry Helleiner, Hollis Chenery, Brian van Arkadie, Reginald Herbold Green and Michael Intrigilator. The most important of all for his personal future was Alison Bishop, who was studying the behaviour of the lemurs of Madagascar for her doctorate.[10] Richard later managed to extend his African field research to include Madagascar, but on his way there stopped off in Addis Abba for a two-month assignment for the Economic Commission for Africa.[11] His letters warning Alison of this delay failed, in circumstances reminiscent of a Hardy novel, to reach her, and it was only by the sheerest good fortune that she was able to meet his plane when he finally arrived.[12] In 1963 Richard and Alison were married in the Royal Pavilion in Brighton and had two daughters and two sons. The marriage proved to be a strong foundation on which both of their careers could flourish. Alison had already found her lifetime scientific interest and was able to build a reputation through her research and writing – her textbook The Evolution of Primate Behaviour (1978) had sold over 50,000 copies by the 1990s. However, she sought only visiting appointments at universities and so was able to accompany Richard when his career took him to different places at different times.
While at Makerere University in 1964, Richard responded to an advert by the Department of Applied Economics (DAE) in Cambridge for a researcher working on developing economies, for a project funded by the UK Department of Technical Co-operation. He told the DAE that he intended to research on education in Northern Rhodesia, soon to be Zambia, and was appointed. In his long and distinguished career, this was the only occasion on which he ever applied for a job. A few months later when Dudley Seers was leading a mission to Northern Rhodesia, he asked Richard to cover the education sector, which he did, focusing on the education needs in what was a copper-rich country and, for the first five years after independence, the fastest growing country in Africa.[13] Richard then returned to Makerere for the rest of the academic year, but later went back to Zambia to work at the Ministry of National Planning on manpower planning. They were able to get a good picture of the whole of the supply side of the labour market. However, estimating the demand side was a more doubtful business. Richard’s was sceptical of the Harbison and Myers rules of thumb for inferring labour requirements from economic growth rates.[14] In any case, the key issue for the Zambians was not future demand but the speed of the Zambianisation of the labour force.