1 Early Life
The values that shape Sir Paul Collier’s work were formed at an early age. The son of a pork butcher, he grew up in working-class Sheffield as its traditional industries began to decline, studying at the local State grammar school but also working in his parents’ shop.
(Economic policy making is often compared to the making of sausages, but he is perhaps the only person in the world who is professionally qualified to comment on this comparison.) He grew up in the impoverished deindustrialising north of England, but the grammar school system provided him with an education that would lead to a professional life engaged with the causes of poverty.After completing school, Paul won a place at Trinity College, Oxford, but the beginning of his university education in 1967 was not entirely auspicious. He was enrolled to read Law, a subject that he soon found to be entirely unsuitable for him, and his college was comprised almost entirely of boys from elite private schools, who were not always entirely welcoming to butcher’s boys. Fortunately, there was little in the way of formal administrative structure at Oxford, so the tutors at Trinity accepted without question his
I am grateful to Paul for a conversation that informs this chapter.
D. Fielding (*)
Global Development Institute, University of Manchester, Manchester, UK e-mail: david.fielding@manchester.ac.uk
© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 673
R. A. Cord (ed.), The Palgrave Companion to Oxford Economics, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-58471-9_27
decision to switch from Law to Philosophy, Politics and Economics (PPE) in his first term.
Equally fortunately, Paul met Keith Griffin, the Oxford don who introduced him to development economics. Oxford already had an established group of researchers working on the economics of South Asia, but there was very little research on Africa. Under Keith's supervision, Paul worked on his first piece of development economics research: a study on Malawi, written for an undergraduate essay prize. This led to an interview with Patrick Minford for a position in Malawi funded by the Overseas Development Administration, the precursor to the Department for International Development. The interview was successful, but Paul was prevented from taking up the position by a decline in his father's health: his first graduate position was back in the butcher's shop.