Tamotsu Nishizawa

No wealth but life: Welfare economics and the welfare state in Britain, 1880-1945

This book re-examines early-twentieth-century British welfare economics in the context of the emergence of the welfare state. There are fresh views of the well-known Cambridge School of Sidgwick, Marshall, Pigou, and Keynes, by Peter Groenewegen, Steven G. Medema, and Martin Daunton. This is placed against a less-well-known Oxford approach to welfare: Yuichi Shionoya explores its foundations in the idealist philosophy of T. H. Green; Roger E. Backhouse considers the work of its leading exponent, J. A. Hobson; and Tamotsu Nishizawa discusses the spread of this approach abroad. Finally, the book covers welfare economics in the policy arena: Richard Toye points to the possible infl uence of H. G. Wells on Churchill and Lloyd George, and Maria Cristina Marcuzzo and Atsushi Komine discuss Keynes and Beveridge. A substantial introduction frames the discussion, and a postscript relates these ideas to the work of Robbins and subsequent developments in welfare economics.

Marshall and Schumpeter on Evolution

This unique and original work contends that, despite the differences between Marshallian and Schumpeterian thinking, they both present formidable challenges to a broad type of social science beyond economics, particularly under the influence of the German historical school. In a departure from the received view on the nature of the works of Marshall and Schumpeter, the contributors explore their themes in terms of an evolutionary vision and method of evolution; social science and evolution; conceptions of evolution; and evolution and capitalism.

Marshall’s Ideas on Progress: Roots and Diffusion

This highly illuminating book marks a significant stage in our growing understanding of how the development of national traditions of economic thought has been affected by both internal and external factors.

Introduction: Towards a reinterpretation of the history of welfare economics

Towards the end of the 19th century, the laissez-faire ideology that had dominated Victorian Britain was increasingly called into question. There was great prosperity yet poverty remained endemic. London’s poor East End was, for the middle classes, a dangerous foreign world quite unlike the areas in which they lived. Socialism was in the air. This term could denote a wide spectrum of positions, from Marxism and other forms of revolutionary socialism at one end to municipal socialism, centred on local authority provision of public goods and services, from sewers to street lighting, at the other. There were also important national initiatives in areas such as education . Such concerns were given impetus by the extension of the franchise to the working class, in 1867, 1884 and 1918, and by the rise of organised labour and the Labour movement , culminating in the displacement, in Parliament, of the Liberal Party by the Labour Party . Questions about the functioning of a capitalist economy became even more acute with the economic turmoil of the inter-war period, culminating in the Great Depression, when capitalism seemed, to many, to have failed. After 1917 there was, in the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics, an alternative with which comparisons could be made. However, as in the late 19th century, the issue facing most economists was not whether capitalism was so fl awed that it needed to be overthrown but whether its faults could be put right by measures that fell far short of a Soviet-style command economy. John Maynard Keynes , in his General Theory ( 1936 ), pointed to one apparent limitation of capitalism – its inability to keep workers and resources fully employed and suggested ways in which it could be made to work better.

The Dissemination of Economic Ideas

This highly illuminating book marks a significant stage in our growing understanding of how the development of national traditions of economic thought has been affected by both internal and external factors.

Progress beyond growth: Some insights from Marshall's final book

Abstract Alfred Marshall had a very challenging project to write a treatise in two or more volumes that could contain his main interests and reflections. Instead of that treatise, Marshall published three books (Principles of Economics, Industry and Trade and Money Credit and Commerce). They cover only in part the ground that the treatise should have contained. That is why Marshall went on with the idea of publishing another final book. In this paper, we give a brief summary of the structure and the contents of this book, focusing more in detail on some subjects particularly interesting and meaningful.

Marshall on Welfare Economics and the Welfare State

It is well known that Marshalls Principles of Economics contained a number of innovations in economics which became part of the toolbox of welfare economics and that some of these had their roots in his early writings. The notion of consumers surplus is a good instance (see Myint 1948 for a classic treatment of this subject). Moreover, Marshalls broad hint at a tax/bounty policy designed to favour increasing returns industries and to penalise those working under diminishing returns was a policy for enhancing growth of output through a state induced shift in resource allocation of productive factors. For Marshall, of course, output growth was advantageous to all classes of society and of particular benefit to the poor. Such an emphasis on output in welfare policy was part of Marshalls classical heritage, since as Myint (1948) has also pointed out in his still very authoritative historical treatment of welfare economics in the 19th and early 20th centuries, the classical approach to welfare economics was heavily output orientated. On the other hand, it is less well known that some of Marshalls perspectives on social progress, including those that remain unpublished from the material housed in the Marshall papers, embrace aspects of what later became known as the welfare state. In fact, some of his later published views, particularly his 1907 excursus into economic chivalry (Marshall 1907) and the final chapter on progress in the later editions of the Principles (Marshall 1961, Book VI, chapter XIII) contain support for state initiatives to enhance the welfare of society, with special reference to the welfare of the poorest sections of the community.

Marshall on Progress and People's Welfare

The paper focuses on Marshall’s ideas of the economic and socio-ethical progress, of the development of man’s higher faculties, and of people’s welfare and improvement of their quality of life. The studies on economic and social progress with prospects for the elimination of human poverty and the higher development of human faculties, were ‘the high theme’ and the crucial ideas of his whole economics writings of Marshall. For him ‘the solution of economic problems was not an application of the hedonistic calculus, but a prior condition of the exercise of man’s higher faculties’. The paper stresses a nonutilitarian perspective. The first section examines the man’s economic conditions and human character, work and life, economic and ethical progress. Then the second section discusses about the ideas moralizing capitalism and citizenship, which is followed by the section on education and strength of the people; and supported by the discussions on the cumulative effects of people’s wages in the final section.

The Dissemination of Economic Ideas: Introduction

In March 2009 a joint meeting of the Japanese and European Societies for the History of Economic Thought was held in Tokyo and Kyoto, dedicated to the theme of ‘The Dissemination of Economic Ideas’.2 This volume presents selected papers from that conference, marking a signifi cant stage in our growing understanding of the manner in which the ebb and fl ow in the development of national traditions of economic thought has been aff ected by the interaction of internal and external factors. We should also note that the possibility of discussing the dissemination process in such a context was itself made possible by the existence of a European society which has over the past decade and a half provided a framework for regular meetings of scholars who are themselves also members of national bodies.3 While the subject matter of this collection reaches back to the seventeenth century, regular interchanges of the kind represented by the Tokyo and Kyoto meetings go back no more than 20 or 30 years. And so this book places an explicit agenda – study of the dissemination of economic ideas over a period of four centuries – within an implicit framework which is, relatively speaking, quite new. This introduction is directed to both of these issues, but begins necessarily from the intentions framing the March 2009 meetings.4 Consideration of the propagation and dissemination of economic ideas comes naturally to Japanese scholars, for the Meiji Restoration of 1867 inaugurated a period of rapid change for Japanese society, characterized by the extensive importation of ideas and institutions from the West. This opening of Japan to the West coincided with the ending of the American Civil War and the creation of an independent Germany; during the later nineteenth century these became the most dynamic world economies and consequently important infl uences upon Japanese development. Social and cultural reform in Japan was heavily infl uenced by German models; for example, the Imperial University Act of 1886 followed the Prussian model and Tokyo Imperial University was inaugurated, then in 1896 an association modelled on the Verein für Socialpolitik was founded, while

No Wealth but Life: Frontmatter

This book re-examines early-twentieth-century British welfare economics in the context of the emergence of the welfare state. There are fresh views of the well-known Cambridge School of Sidgwick, Marshall, Pigou, and Keynes, by Peter Groenewegen, Steven G. Medema, and Martin Daunton. This is placed against a less-well-known Oxford approach to welfare: Yuichi Shionoya explores its foundations in the idealist philosophy of T. H. Green; Roger E. Backhouse considers the work of its leading exponent, J. A. Hobson; and Tamotsu Nishizawa discusses the spread of this approach abroad. Finally, the book covers welfare economics in the policy arena: Richard Toye points to the possible infl uence of H. G. Wells on Churchill and Lloyd George, and Maria Cristina Marcuzzo and Atsushi Komine discuss Keynes and Beveridge. A substantial introduction frames the discussion, and a postscript relates these ideas to the work of Robbins and subsequent developments in welfare economics.