Wynne Godley, who died in 2010, worked at the Treasury between 1956 and 1970 before becoming a fellow of King’s College, Cambridge and director of the university’s Department of Applied Economics. He was the author, with Marc Lavoie, of Monetary Economics: An Integrated Approach to Credit, Money, Income, Production and Wealth. He is often credited with anticipating the mass unemployment of the early 1980s, the problems with monetary union in Europe (in ‘Maastricht and All That’, published in the LRB in 1992) and the 2008 financial crash. Briefly a professional oboist in his youth, he was later a director of the Royal Opera House. He described his ‘disastrous encounter with psychoanalysis’ in a much praised piece in the LRB.
The implications for Britain of EEC membership are rapidly becoming so perversely disadvantageous that either a major change in existing arrangements must be made or we shall have, somehow, to withdraw.
For thirty years after the war Britain had full employment, stable (if slow) growth, low inflation, and a welfare state that was widely admired. And it was common ground that governments could...
Godley and Cripps devote their first seven seven pages to acknowledging the storms that are raging around the subject of macroeconomics. Deteriorating economic performances, and monetarists,...
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