Book review: Economists at War

Economists have a key role in advising the government about fiscal and monetary policy. At no time is this more important than during times of crisis. And no crisis is quite like a war. So, I was really interested to read Alan Bollard's 2020 book Economists at War, which the subtitle promises to explain: "how a handful of economists helped win and lose the world wars".

The book essentially covers seven economists: Takahashi Korekiyo, H.H. Kung, Hjalmar Schacht, John Maynard Keynes, Leonid Kantorovich, Wassily Leontief, and John von Neumann, with one chapter devoted primarily to each of them. Bollard is clear that the book is not a biographical account of their lives, and neither is it an economic history of the world wars. Instead, the book focuses on:

...a description of the complex and sometimes terrible positions these economists found themselves in, and how they used their economics and their personalities to address this.

I enjoyed this book, mostly because of the gaps in my own knowledge of the history of economics that it helped to fill. I had never heard of Korekiyo, Kung, or Schacht, and had read little about Kantorovich or Leontief, although I am of course quite familiar with their key contributions to economics, for which Kantorovich and Leontief each won the Nobel Prize in the 1970s. The book appears to be well-researched and thorough in its treatment of each of its subjects, and Bollard shares a lot about their lives outside of economics and on either side of the world wars in which they were key figures. So, in that sense, the book is perhaps more biographical than Bollard may have intended.

As you may expect from a collection of the key figures in economics at the time, there were a large number of connections between them. Many of them met in person, or taught or studied at the same institutions (albeit at different times). However, that leads to the main detraction from this book for me. Because each chapter is devoted to one of these economists, there is a fair amount of repetition across the chapters. There is even, in a few places, repetition within chapters. I felt like those repetitive parts could have been edited out without great loss, and would have made the book flow a little better.

I learned a great deal from reading the book. It gave me a new appreciation of the Japanese economy in the inter-war period, and the rampant corruption in the Chinese government of Chiang Kai-shek, Also, I hadn't appreciated the challenges that Russian economists faced during the premiership of Josef Stalin:

Among his many paranoias, Stalin distrusted economists and particularly mathematical ones. He had said the planned economy of the USSR was 'dizzy with success', and therefore any criticism would be seen as being anti-Soviet. Instead he called for what he labelled 'political economy', which should provide ideological support for party policies. Mathematical economics could be seen as removing the need for ideology and supporting self-regulating market mechanisms, which was a very dangerous direction.

It strikes me that there may be an interesting parallel with modern times, with governments having a preference for ideology over economics. Anyway, that is a story for another time. The key point is that Kantorovich in particular faced some real difficulties in Soviet Russia, given that he was a mathematical economist.

Overall, I rate this book highly, but in avoiding being biographical and simultaneously avoiding being an economic history of the world wars, it sits somewhat awkwardly in the middle. I've read better books on how economics (and operations research) was applied during World War II (Blackett's War, which I reviewed here). And there are better biographies of Keynes and von Neumann - Keynes is well covered in The Worldly Philosophers (which I reviewed here), while Prisoner's Dilemma (which I reviewed here) is a good book on von Neumann. This book does collect good stories of the life and economics of some of the more obscure (in my view) but still important economists of the time, so is worthwhile in that respect, for people interested in the world's economic heritage.