Lionel Robbins

Lionel Charles Robbins, Baron Robbins (1898 - 1984) was a British economist of the 20th century who proposed one of the early contemporary definitions of economics, "Economics is a science which studies human behavior as a relationship between ends and scarce means which have alternative uses."

Lionel Robbins differed from many English economists of the 1920s: he was not a Marshallian but rather a follower of William Stanley Jevons and Philip Wicksteed. He had also actually read the Continental European economists - Léon Walras, Vilfredo Pareto, Eugen von Böhm-Bawerk, Friedrich von Wieser and Knut Wicksell. As a result of his Jevonian, Lausanne, Austrian and Swedish influences, Lord Robbins was instrumental in shifting the train of Anglo-Saxon economics off its Marshallian rails and onto Continental ones.

His tools were the London School of Economics and a famous 1932 essay on economic methodology. Succeeding the unfortunate Allyn Young to the chair of the L.S.E. in 1929, the thirty-year old Robbins proceeded quickly. Among his first appointments was Friedrich A. Hayek, who bred a new generation of English-speaking "continentals" such as John Hicks, Nicholas Kaldor, Abba Lerner and Tibor Scitovsky.

Robbins's early essays were very combative in spirit, stressing the subjectivist theory of value beyond what Anglo-Saxon economics had been used to. His famous work on costs (1930, 1934) helped bring Wieser's "alternative cost" theorem of supply to England (which was opposed to Marshall's "real cost" theory of supply). His critique of the Marshallian theory of the representative firm (1928), and his critique of the Pigovian Welfare Economics (1932, 1938), helped put an end to the Marshallian empire — aided and abetted (and occasionally thwarted) every step of the way by his kindred spirit across the pond, Frank Knight.

It was his 1932 Essay on the Nature and Significance of Economic Science where Robbins made his Continental credentials clear. Redefining the scope of economics to be "the science which studies human behavior as a relationship between ends and scarce means which have alternative uses" (Robbins, 1932). His defense of a priori theory and attack on Marshallian intuitionism is reminiscent of von Mises's essay.

Robbins was initially opposed to Keynes's General Theory. His 1934 treatise on the Great Depression is an exemplary Neoclassical analysis of that period. Indeed, Robbins always saw his L.S.E. as a bulwark against Cambridge, whether it was populated by Marshallians or Keynesians. However, he was eventually to recant and accept the Keynesian Revolution.

In the latter part of his life, Robbins turned to the history of economic thought, publishing various classic studies on English doctrinal history. Although the ascendancy of the L.S.E. is foremost among his legacies, Robbins is also greatly responsible for the modern British university system - having advocated in the Robbins Report its massive expansion in the 1960s. In 1959 he had been created a life peer as Baron Robbins, of Clare Market in the City of Westminster.

References

ISBN links support NWE through referral fees

• Lionel Robbins, The Great Depression, London: Macmillan
• _____, 1932, 2nd ed.,1935 [1962], An Essay on the Nature and Significance of Economic Science. London: Macmillan
• ____, 1938, "Interpersonal Comparisons of Utility: A Comment," Economic Journal, 43(4), 635-41

External links

• Biography at LSE website
• Biography at New School

There are photographs of Baron Robbins, economist, administrator and patron of the arts, in the National Portrait Gallery Collection

• Lionel Charles Robbins

The Robbins Report was commissioned by the British government in the 1960s to look into the future of higher education in the United Kingdom. The Committee on Higher Education was chaired by Lord Robbins from 1961 to 1964. After its publication, its conclusions were accepted by the government on October 24, 1963.

The report recommended immediate expansion of universities, and that all Colleges of Advanced Technology should be given the status of universities. Consequently, the number of full-time university students was to rise from 197,000 in the 1967-68 academic year to 217,000 in the academic year of 1973-74 with "further big expansion" thereafter.

The legacy of the report is plain to see. It led to the establishment of the plate glass universities, notably the universities of Bath, Essex, Keele, Kent, Lancaster, York and Warwick, amongst others, as well as prompting substantial expansion in the existing universities of the UK.

As a footnote, the Senior Research Officer for the committee that drew up the report was a Richard Layard, who became a well-known British economist.

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