Liberalism at Large by Alexander Zevin

Author:Alexander Zevin [Zevin, Alexander]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781781686249
Publisher: Verso

After demobilization, he went to Cambridge, of which he was not fond: ‘More intellectual, my left foot.’ ‘Sub-polytechnic Marxism’ was more like it: some students actually thought it a good idea to give ‘the secret of how to make an atom bomb to Marshall Stalin, who was clinically insane’. Macrae nevertheless found his home at a paper populated by graduates from the same social milieu, if not the same politics, becoming the driving force on economics at the Economist. Statistically dense, stylistically buoyant, many of his surveys turned into books and pamphlets – on capital markets, housing, industrial, trade and monetary policy, inventors, inventions and the near and not-so-near future.44 Writing from a comparative perspective, he set the post-war performance of British capitalism against the more miraculous experiences of its rivals, in special reports on Germany, France, America and Japan – this last the subject of ground-breaking work, with ‘Consider Japan’ in 1962, ‘The Risen Sun’ in 1967 and ‘The Pacific Century’ in 1975, all published in Japanese translation. His obituary called him an ‘unacknowledged giant of postwar Britain’, one of the few journalists to rank with Milton Friedman, Daniel Bell and Peter Drucker. But Macrae was not exactly unknown. In 1988 Emperor Hirohito recognized him with the Order of the Rising Sun. Like many whose star first rose in the West, he was simply big in Japan.45

If the nineteenth century the Economist had looked for investment outlets in the East, by the mid-twentieth it went in search of lessons. The parallels between Britain and Japan, two island nations ‘with very similar import structures and a tendency to run into import deficit at one stage of the internal trade cycle’, captivated Macrae. He was aghast that some Japanese policymakers he met in the 1960s thought it ‘time to learn respectable economics from the British and slow down their rate of growth’. One reason for coming to Japan, he told his hosts, was on the contrary to find an escape route for Britain, whose post-war economy seemed caught in a cycle of ‘stop-go’ – periods of expansion in which imports quickly raced ahead of exports, precipitating a balance of payments crisis, at which point government intervened to restrain demand, deflating the economy. The result? British industrial production had grown by 28 per cent, exports by 44 per cent, from 1953 to 1961; over this period, Japan increased its respective totals by 217 and 237 per cent. In 1955 Japan’s GDP was £8.2 billion against Britain’s £17 billion. By 1967 it was expected to be £40 billion, 18 per cent larger than Britain’s at about £34 billion.

In trying to explain the divergence, Macrae rejected explanations based on race or culture. Japanese ‘were not nowadays naturally servile to authority, or so silly as to actively enjoy hard work’, and ‘the inbred collectivism of the Japanese people’ was not unlike ‘the atmosphere in the heartier English public schools’. Macrae paid attention to government policies instead, which turned out to be inimical to standard practice in Britain and the US.

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