Lionel Charles Robbins, Baron Robbins, (22 November 1898 – 15 May 1984) was a British economist, and prominent member of the economics department at the London School of Economics (LSE). He is known for his leadership at LSE, his proposed definition of economics, and for his instrumental efforts in shifting Anglo-Saxon economics from its Alfred Marshall direction. He is famous for the quote, "Humans want what they can't have."
Robbins was educated at home, at Hounslow College (a preparatory school) and at Southall County School. He went to University College London in October 1915, beginning an Arts degree and attending lectures by W. P. Ker, the medievalist Francis Charles Montague, and A. F. Pollard. Wishing to serve in World War I, he began training in early 1916 at Topsham, Devon. He was in the Royal Field Artillery as an officer from August 1916 to 1918, when he was wounded by a sniper on 12 April in the Battle of the Lys and returned home with the rank of lieutenant.
During the war Robbins became interested in guild socialism, reading in G. D. H. Cole and by personal contact with Reginald Lawson, a connection from the Harris side of the family. Through Clive Gardiner, an artist commissioned by Dick Robbins in 1917 to paint his son's portrait, Robbins met first Alfred George Gardiner, Clive's father, and then his ally the activist James Joseph Mallon. After his convalescence and 1919 demobilisation from the army, Robbins was employed for about a year by the Labour Campaign for the Nationalization of the Drink Trade, a position found with Mallon's help. The campaign was an offshoot of the State Management Scheme set up during the war, and Robbins worked in Mecklenburgh Square, London for Mallon and Arthur Greenwood.
In 1920, Robbins resumed studies at the London School of Economics (LSE), where he was taught by Harold Laski, Edwin Cannan and Hugh Dalton. He graduated B.Sc. (Econ) in 1923 with first class honours. Dalton's biographer Ben Pimlott wrote that Robbins was the "most promising student of his generation at the L.S.E."
In 1927, Robbins returned to New College as a Fellow, but continued to teach at LSE, lecturing on a weekly basis. After the death in 1929 of Allyn Abbott Young, Professor of Economics at LSE, Robbins replaced him in the chair, and moved with his wife to Hampstead Garden Suburb. During the 1930s he built up the economics department, hiring Friedrich von Hayek, John Hicks and Nicholas Kaldor.
Robbins refused to sign a draft by Keynes of proposals including and wanted the chance to submit a minority report. Keynes as chair would not grant the request, given that Robbins was in a minority of one. Robbins, who had compared the protectionist views to those of Lord Rothermere and Lord Beaverbrook, walked out of a meeting, and briefed Philip Snowden against the report that contained a version of his criticism, considered himself poorly treated. Bad feeling persisted for years between LSE and Cambridge economists.
Initially, Robbins was opposed to Keynes's 1936 General Theory. His own 1934 treatise on the Great Depression is an analysis belonging to that period of his thought. Later, he accepted the need for government intervention.
From 1942 Robbins worked largely on planning for post-war reconstruction, with Meade. When John Boyd Orr and Frank Lidgett McDougall successfully lobbied to put food security on the agenda of the United Nations, Robbins attended the resulting 1943 conference at Hot Springs, Virginia. He represented the United Kingdom also at the Bretton Woods Conference of 1944 and took part in the negotiation of the 1946 Anglo-American loan. Over this period, he became fully reconciled with John Maynard Keynes.
Post-war, Robbins wrote:
I grew up in a tradition in which, while recognition was indeed given to the problems created by the ups and downs of the trade cycle and the fluctuations of aggregate demand, there was a tendency to ignore certain deep-seated possibilities of disharmony, in a way which, I now think, led sometimes to superficiality and sometimes to positive error. I owe much to Cambridge economists, particularly to Lord Keynes and Professor Robertson, for having awakened me from dogmatic slumbers in this very important respect. The Economic Problem in Peace and War – Some Reflections on Objectives and Mechanisms, Read Books, 2007 (1st ed. 1947), pp. 68.
In later life, Robbins turned to the history of economic thought, publishing studies on English doctrinal history. His LSE lectures, as he gave them in 1980, were later published.
After contention in the 1930s, this definition reached some general acceptance among economists. The book has six chapters, and the second half remains controversial.
The Essay was influenced by Nathan Isaacs, a close friend from the army, and a paper he had given to the Aristotelian Society in June 1931. The same month, Robbins sent Isaacs a copy of his inaugural lecture, commenting (in relation to ) that its content was out of date through not taking account of work of the Austrians Friedrich Hayek and Ludwig von Mises. Hayek's cycle theory, and Jacob Viner's work on the balance of payments for Canada, both developments of the 1920s, were used as contrasting examples, respectively of new theorisation and the checking of existing theories. Part of the intellectual framework was the insistence of Isaacs on the importance of inductive reasoning, where Robbins relied more naturally on deductions.
Robbins received an Honorary degree from Heriot-Watt University in 1967. The Lionel Robbins Building at the London School of Economics is named after him. Since 2009 that building has had on the exterior of it an installation artwork, Blue Rain, by the American artist Michael Brown. There is also a Lionel Robbins Building at Nottingham Trent University.
Robbins' 1966 Chichele lecture on the accumulation of capital (published in 1968) and later work on Adam Smith economics, The Theory of Economic Policy in English Classical Political Economy, have been described as imprecise.
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