Conclusion
There were both political and personal reasons for the failure of Philip Andrews' challenge to economic orthodoxy (see King 1988: 205-206). In the late 1940s, socialist ideas were very influential among British economists, many of whom stressed the ubiquity of market failure and the need for comprehensive intervention by the State.
In his defence of business and business people, Andrews was swimming against a powerful tide. At the personal level, he failed to work with or even acknowledge the achievements of potential allies, insisting instead that ‘room is left for the anarchist who obstinately wants to work within the limitations of his own presuppositions and experience' (Andrews 1957: 71).In his review of the 1993 book of essays, Robert Rothschild came to rather similar conclusions:
The question is why Andrews’ influence upon the direction subsequently taken by industrial economics turned out to be as modest as it did. Undoubtedly, his opaque exposition and the way in which he chose to present his ideas will have played a role, as will the fact that his model must have struck some of his contemporaries as underdetermined in a mathematical sense and others as susceptible to a mathematical interpretation which could be straightforwardly reconciled with the marginalist paradigm. Moreover, while Andrews’ model seems to provide an intuitively appealing description of some aspects of business practice, it does not appear to offer a way into the analysis of many of the problems which are the legitimate concern of modern industrial economics. Strategic interdependence amongst oligopolists is one example of an area of research which the marginalist approach has rendered tractable in a way which would not have been possible within Andrews’ framework. On a more personal level, Earl notes that Andrews was very much a “loner” who neglected to market his insights by establishing coalitions with like-minded economists, especially those working in the United States.
In failing somehow to make an immediate impact he was denied the basis for influence in the longer term. Yet many of his insights have since been incorporated without acknowledgement in the work of others, or independently rediscovered by authors unfamiliar with them. Recent work on “contestability”, for example, emphasises the role of potential competition as a source of market discipline and an inducement for existing firms to seek no more than competitive profits (Rothschild 1995: 196).Similarly, Jacobsen notes that the emerging discipline of strategic management would benefit from an acknowledgement of Andrews' work on the ‘two leading approaches to strategy (industrial organisation and resource-based)' (Jacobsen 2017: 205). Peter Earl, in his appraisal of the “new behavioural” economics of the 2017 Nobel Laureate Richard Thaler, regrets the lack of any reference in his writings on fairness” in pricing decisions to the previous work of Marshall, the OERG and (especially) Philip Andrews (see Earl 2018: 119). Perhaps, half a century after his death, the obstinate anarchist will at last receive the recognition that he deserves.