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Think of a great economist, and you’ll probably think of a man. Perhaps Adam Smith, who famously wrote about the market’s invisible hand. Or Alfred Marshall, whose supply and demand curves young economists still learn to draw. Or maybe Milton Friedman, champion of monetarism.
In a new book, Rachel Reeves, the UK Labour party’s shadow chancellor, argues that the standard line up of great economists is incomplete.The Women Who Made Modern Economics aims to correct that by showing the thinkers and campaigners who shaped the discipline “in more ways than is recognised”. Her hope is that “these women and their stories act as role models”, increasing the diversity of future economists.
Her examples are wide-ranging. Take Harriet Martineau, who in the 1800s popularised Smith’s ideas, pushing free trade to a mass audience using fictional stories including one called “Berkeley the Banker”. Or Mary Paley Marshall, whose ideas about why economic clusters exist were the basis of a book co-authored with her husband Alfred. Or Anna Schwartz, who wrote A Monetary History of the United States with Milton Friedman. (Friedman himself admitted that she “did all the work and I got a lot of the credit.”)
Reeves, a former Bank of England economist, writes clearly and accessibly, painting portraits of female economists and explaining how they were informed by the conditions of the time. She aims for breadth rather than depth, which may leave her nerdiest readers a little disappointed.
Another disappointment is that some of Reeves’s words are not her own. Spot checks reveal passages of biographical detail and political history seemingly copied from Wikipedia, specialist blogs, the Guardian and even the writing of a Labour front bench colleague, without acknowledgment.
Responding to that criticism, the book’s publisher cited an extensive and selective bibliography and said that at no point did she seek to present as original research the details the FT flagged to it. “When factual sentences were taken from primary sources, they should have been rewritten and properly referenced. We acknowledge this did not happen in every case.” It said any omissions would be rectified in future reprints.
On the substance of the book, one obvious question is whether, if women’s contributions were properly recognised, economics would look any different. Survey evidence does suggest that female economists are more sympathetic to increased environmental protection, more comfortable with government intervention, and more accepting of the idea that men and women have unequal opportunities.
Some of the women Reeves profiles could certainly be labelled as bleeding-heart lefties. Beatrice Webb, who co-founded the London School of Economics and is one of Reeves’ subjects, took from her experience visiting the Lancashire mills in the 1880s that “destitution is a disease of society itself”, and warned that overemphasising incentives in the welfare system would punish those who could not work. Joan Robinson, an economist at the University of Cambridge in the 20th century, argued for a minimum wage — otherwise employers would push wages too low.
But picking out patterns is tricky. Martineau was a vocal critic of government-imposed trade restrictions, while Schwartz was an ardent free marketeer. Reeves highlights disagreements between her subjects, for example that between Dambisa Moyo, who argues that poor countries would do better if they were subject to the discipline of free-market capitalism and not coddled by aid, while Sakiko Fukuda-Parr warns that free markets left to their own devices merely entrench inequality.
Reeves does not seem to be arguing that a world in which women were in charge would be much better than the one we got. Indeed, she very often disagrees with the women she highlights. She worries that Nobel winner Elinor Ostrom, who argued that local management of public resources can work well in the real world, understates the importance of global climate agreements. And she maintains that Schwartz took her theoretical ideas about controlling the supply of money too far, by advocating for tighter monetary policy when the economy could not bear it.
The book highlights brilliant women who have shaped the global economy. But of course there is another aim here, barely concealed — to make the case that the author should join their ranks. Britain has never before had a female chancellor, a fact referenced at least seven times.
Reeves is a politician and it should be no surprise that she has written a political book. Still, some of the segues are a little abrupt. She approvingly shares Webb’s critique of economists, which is that they too often dress up in academic jargon what is obvious to most people, as well as her recommendation that economists should spend more energy on forecasting. Then she interrupts with a political broadcast: “The power of ‘predict, prepare and protect’ in economics was never clearer to me than during Labour’s battle for a windfall tax on energy and gas companies.”
The Women Who Made Modern Economics is an audition piece, clearly intended to demonstrate that Reeves is a serious, thoughtful contender to run Britain’s economy. It also does the valuable job of challenging readers’ preconceptions of what an economist is. But perhaps the most important lesson to come out of it is the importance of giving credit where it is due.
The Women Who Made Modern Economics by Rachel Reeves Basic Books £20, 288 pages
Soumaya Keynes is an FT economics columnist