Introduction1

‘Do you know any Baloghian economics?' It would have been a challenging enough question at any time, but the context piled on the pressure. The ques­tioner was Theo Cooper, then Tutorial Fellow in Economics at St Hugh's, Oxford, known for being both ‘crushingly intelligent' and so manifestly honest that she was incapable of hiding her disdain for stupidity.

Fortunately, I had the wit only to say ‘not much' and, after a few moments of terrifying scrutiny, she pushed a clutch of brown folders across to me saying, ‘You had better read these'. They were labelled “Economic Adviser's Office only. Top Secret”.

Baloghian economics, it transpired, involved. well, just about any­thing. After only an hour of skim reading I had come across memos about microprocessor technology, Rhodesian sanctions, the psychology of the

¹ I am grateful to Frances Stewart and Vijay Josh for comments, to Robert Cord for eagle-eyed editing and to Yasmin Rafiei for assistance with the bibliography. As usual, all errors remain my responsibility.

A. Graham (*)

Oxford Internet Institute, Oxford, UK

e-mail: andrew.graham@balliol.ox.ac.uk

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 347

R. A. Cord (ed.), The Palgrave Companion to Oxford Economics, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-58471-9_15

French, the stupidity of the civil servants at the Board of Trade, foreign exchange controls, awards to university students, international liquidity, public purchasing, the funding and organisation of research councils, changes to the Selective Employment Tax, company law, balance of pay­ments forecasts and car prices.

In his academic writings, Balogh's sinners (and his very occasional saints) are condemned to the depths of his incomparable footnotes, but in his Whitehall minutes, sprayed around like a machine gun, the human agents were in the thick of the action. It was X who was responsible for this piece of damage, Y with this foolish idea, Z who, if promoted, might just possibly put it right.

I rapidly learned that Balogh was formidably clever, totally unconventional and accepted no boundaries to academic disciplines. I recall him growling at me in his inimitable Hungarian accent, ‘Why is the female always more deadly than the male?' The object of his attention was not Mrs Thatcher—despite the appropriateness of his remark—but a traffic warden, stabbing a ticket onto a Rolls-Royce in Parliament Street. ‘Dressed like a “vasp”, you see'. The warden was clearly meant to hear. She could also hardly avoid his unflinching inspec­tion: a penetrating gaze out of small slanted brown eyes over the top of his glasses. The occasion was typical. He was a detailed observer (especially of people and every aspect of their behaviour); he cared little for what other people thought (or, rather, he liked to give this impression); and he said what he thought or what he thought would provoke.

Typical it may have been. Representative it cannot be. Thomas Balogh, or “Tommy” as he was known to most of his friends, was too colourful and too talented to be captured in a single example. Paul Streeten compared conversa­tion with him to wandering through a well-stocked department store: ‘One never quite knows what wares will turn up next, but each department presents an array of beautiful and useful items. The moves were sometimes vertical, sometimes horizontal, sometimes diagonal, but always unpredictable' (Streeten 2000: 35).

On another occasion, I was with him at a meeting in the Ministry of Power (as it then was) discussing with the civil servants how much gas the oil com­panies might actually be finding under the North Sea and he suddenly hissed to me in a stage whisper, ‘You know they are all in ze pay of the oil companies' and then left the meeting, leaving me to face the glares of the ‘they'.

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