The Power of Economic Ideas: Australian Economists in the Thirties

Alex Millmow

History of Economics Review, 2003, vol. 37, issue 1, 84-99

Abstract: This paper examines the struggle economists in interwar Australia faced in coming to terms with new ideas on economic philosophy and whether they, in fact, registered upon Commonwealth economic policy. After being unusually great in 1931, with the Premiers’ Plan, the significance of economists waned as political complacency, brought about by the recovery itself, took over. Economists reasserted their influence, however, by the mid-1930s. This triumphant view of economists, however, finds little corroboration in Boris Schedvin’s study of the depression in Australia, which quickly succeeded in changing the perception of Australian interwar economists, and their contribution to policy, from triumph to ineptitude. This paper rehabilitates the work of Australian interwar economists, arguing that they not only had an enviable international reputation but also facilitated the acceptance of Keynes’s General Theory among policymakers before their counterparts did in the Northern Hemisphere.

Date: 2003
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DOI: 10.1080/10370196.2003.11733391

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