Remembering the dead, to begin the year on a new slate

By Tirthankar Mukherjee

The beginning of a year is a better time than most to remember those who passed away in the year just left behind. The idea of doing so for this column came to me as I was flying back to Mongolia and that explains, even if it does not excuse, the randomness of my choice, given the exigencies of space. All my choices were exceptionally gifted minds but I do not imply that their contribution to economic thought was more important than others I do not touch upon.

The first person I thought of was Angus Maddison who loved to be called a chiffrephile – a lover of numbers. His forte was economic growth, past and present,  and he studied and wrote on almost every aspect of what caused it and what could be done to encourage it. He built up data that enabled him to publish estimates of gross domestic product for 56 countries dating back to 1820, showing that growth accelerated across the western world from that point. His wrtings forced a rethink of theories of growth, postulating take-off at different points in time for large western economies at which mercantilism was “suddenly” succeeded by an industrial “revolution”.

Maddison’s datasets were sometimes controvesial as the sources he used ranged from centuries-old wills to early-modern royal surveys of Mughal India. but no economic historian could ignore them. He even estimated world output in the year AD1. He was convinced, and convincing, in his view that rising income per capita was a necessary if not a sufficient condition for the improvement in human welfare, ignoring proposals to deduct estimates of the social costs of growth from his estimates of output. Some elderly Mongolians might remember him for he visited here, with his usual purpose of improving his perspective on how to bring policy proposals into line with how those meant to benefit would view them.

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