Conclusion
If citations be the ‘coinage of reward in academia' (Blaug, 1999b) then English economics has maintained its propensity to punch well above its weight, albeit with its influence diminished relative to its golden age of the nineteenth and first half of the twentieth centuries.
It, like the British economy, has thus enjoyed unprecedented absolute growth and endured relative decline. Of course, despite a century and more of relative decline, the British economy is still the world's sixth largest, and as we have seen from Blaug (1999b) British economists — which means principally English residents — were the second most cited, achieving a share half that of the US but with less than one quarter of the national population.Whilst English economists have this global profile and significance it is debateable whether a distinctive English economics has survived the pasteurisation that has been central to the Americanisation/internationalisation of the discipline. This is to raise very large questions about contemporary science, universities and indeed national identities in a global world, matters all beyond our scope here. As it is, English economics has not in recent years produced an economist of the significance of Marshall or Keynes, nor even economists who attained the public profile enjoyed by Kaldor and Balogh as late as the 1970s.
However, this is as much a result of the decline of ‘donnish dominion' (Halsey, 1992) as the relative decline of English economics. Arguably, some very English preoccupations have endured, and are manifest in the weight and significance of a range of niche areas in Britain, from applied economics (multiple producers) through to very traditional distributional concerns (Tony Atkinson (b. 1944) on inequality). Like the British economy, where niche products prevail, and the so-called knowledge economy is the aspiration, the future of English economics is hopefully world-class general competence with appropriate specialisations according to academic comparative advantage. For some, who seek a post-autistic economics, the present feels a transitional time for the discipline. If so, it is appropriate to end with Hutchison (1978, xii):
A fuller and clearer understanding of the past record over the last 200 years, in the first instance more widely disseminated amongst economists, might, or could, have a useful part to play in promoting a clearer grasp of the possibilities of economic knowledge.
Note
* My thanks to Roger Backhouse and Keith Tribe for helping to fill in the gaps in my historical knowledge.