The Economic Record: From infancy to lusty stripling
The Economic Record: From infancy to lusty stripling
They say that the wheels of academia turn slowly. Well, consider this. In August 1925 the Economic Society of Australia and New Zealand came into formal existence after branches had already been established in six Australian states and four major cities of New Zealand. One outcome of that first meeting of the governing Central Council of the Society was to proceed with the idea of producing an economic journal. It would be the first of its kind in Australia. It would help in encouraging the study of economics and generating some much-needed debate on economic policy matters affecting the Australasian economies.
After some cursory discussion the Council decided the name of the new journal would be The Economic Record and be modelled on the Royal Economic Society’s The Economic Journal. Every member of the Society was expected to receive the journal, the idea being that its distribution would help in the dissemination of economics knowledge. While the Record was to have every appearance of an academic journal, much of its content certainly in the first 40 years were written by business folk, bankers, statisticians and public servants.
The astonishing thing about the first issue of the Record was how quickly it got into production with the first issue appearing in November 1925 - just four months after it had been commissioned! Would that happen today? One subscriber, Heney Bland who received his copy in early December from the University of Sydney congratulated the editor on the ‘colossal’ job of turning out the journal so quickly reported that the issue ‘showed signs of hurried proof-reading’. That editor in question was Douglas Copland, the professor of commerce at the University of Melbourne. Copland was the also the first President of the Society in respect of him being the driving force in establishing the Society in the first case.
The first issue had several scholarly articles, book reviews, details on some recent government legislation. It also contained notes on how the Society came into being as well as its constitution. One of the articles was on the nature and growth of Australia’s population by the then national statistician, Charles Wickens. He concluded that the population of Australia would reach 10 million by 1951 and 20 million by 1975. There were also articles on wage arbitration, land settlement and the measurement of business activity in New Zealand.
The standout article, however, was that by the University of Tasmania economist, James Brigden on ‘The Australian Tariff and the Standard of living’. It amounted to economic heresy. Brigden was initially going to send his article to the Economic Journal but after some persuasion from his colleagues decided to send it to the Record. He knew that the heretical conclusions of his paper ‘would stir up interest so effectively…although I risk myself, the Society may benefit from the interest aroused. We need a lively first number’. Copland readily agreed that ’the work should generate a great respect for economic theory’.
In his paper Brigden concluded that a policy of uninhibited free trade would reduce the standard of living and retard the economic development of Australia. His argument was premised on the idea that if Australia adopted a policy of free trade the expansion of agricultural sector would inevitably encounter diminishing returns. In contrast, protection would raise the standard of living for ordinary Australian workers living in the cities. While Brigden backed tariff protection, he was, along with his colleagues, wary of giving it carte blanche.
Brigden’s article anticipated the findings of The Australian Tariff; an Economic Inquiry (1929) that was initiated by the Prime Minister Stanley Bruce who was concerned about the prevalence of tariff protection and the fear that it was getting out of control. The Report was subsequently dubbed the Brigden Report since he was the influential force behind its findings.
In 1930 Copland sent a copy of the Brigden report to the Chicago University economist Jacob Viner asking him to review it for the Record. Viner duly did so but was not convinced that the five Australian economists who authored the Brigden Report had made a striking new contribution to the theory of trade protection. The story did not end there. Enter Marion Crawford Samuelson, wife of Paul’s and a mathematical economist in her own right. She wrote an article in the Quarterly Journal of Economics in 1939 entitled ‘The Australian Case for Protection Re-examined’ saying that the conclusions of the Brigden report showed how protection could skew income distribution in favour of labour was correct in certain cases. Her work anticipated the Stoper-Samuelson theorem.
All things considered the Economic Record had indeed got off to an auspicious start. In 1930 Wickens wrote to Copland expressing rather awkwardly his gratitude to him on behalf of the economists of Australia and elsewhere ‘for all the work you have done in bringing the journal into being and guiding its feeble footsteps through the dangers common to infancy. It is now a lusty stripling’.
Alex Millmow has written a centennial history of the Economic Society of Australia which will be published by Australian Scholarly Press.
