Book review: Economists in the Cold War

In 2024, I reviewed Alan Bollard's book Economists at War, noting that it sat awkwardly in-between being a biography and an economic history. I just finished reading Bollard's 2023 book Economists in the Cold War, which follows a similar approach.

This book is basically a sequel to the earlier book, and adopts a similar format, focusing on seven economists: Harry Dexter White, Oskar Lange, John von Neumann, Ludwig Erhard, Joan Robinson, Saburo Okita, and Raul Prebisch. Each chapter is devoted to the life and works (and times) of one of these eminent economists. This book differs from the earlier volume by setting each of the seven economists against one of their contemporaries, respectively: John Maynard Keynes, Friedrich Hayek, Leonid Kantorovich, Jean Monnet, Paul Samuelson, Zhou En-lai, and Walt Rostow.

There is a bit of overlap with the earlier book, which features Keynes, Kantorovich, and von Neumann. However, there is plenty of new material in this book, and I especially appreciated the chapters on Lange, Erhard, Okita, and Prebisch, who I knew little about. I also really enjoyed the chapter on Joan Robinson, which helped me to solve the mystery (to me, at least) of why she never won the Nobel Prize in Economics. On that point, Bollard writes that:

Once more, Robinson had no compunction about forming strong public views from limited evidence on contentious issues... It has been suggested that the polemical content of these writings may have cost Joan Robinson the Nobel Prize in economics which her mainstream contributions might otherwise have earned... She never saw the need to separate her economic findings and her political opinions.

Bollard has a good way of bringing in anecdotes, even though he is adamant that he is not writing a biography of each economist. On Oskar Lange, Bollard tells us that:

...he was once invited to lunch by Al Capone the famous gangster, who he found to be self-educated and well-read with a good knowledge of politics and economics. They had a most interesting conversation, and at the end Capone offered: 'Professor, if you ever have a problem, anything at all, please do not hesitate to call me!'...

It is not just any economist who can call on such support! On the negative side, there is a fair amount of repetition, both between this book and the earlier volume, and even within the book itself. For instance, Bollard twice tells us that British government economist Alex Cairncross's brother John was a spy for the Soviets, within the span of 17 pages. This, and the several other similar instances, is a minor point in an otherwise excellent book, but was quite distracting for me.

Overall, I rate this book as highly as the earlier volume, but as I noted at the beginning it suffers from a similar flaw. In trying to avoid being biography and economic history, it ends up awkwardly caught in-between. Perhaps my views have softened somewhat on this in the last couple of years, or perhaps it was that this book covered a lot of new ground for me, but I thought that overall this was the better of the two books. Like Bollard's earlier book, I recommend this one for anyone interested in the key players and in the development of 20th Century economics.