Later Appraisals

Andrews published little after the appearance of On Competition, with failing health and his professorial duties at Lancaster putting paid to any possibility that he would write the treatise on the theory of the firm that he had earlier contemplated.

Throughout the period of our collaboration, I saw a great deal of Philip. Our relations were always cordial and I found him an easy person to work with. Philip had certain problems in Oxford, which he used to discuss with me at some length. The time is not ripe for a reference to all that was involved. Perhaps, it never will be and the matter may be allowed to pass into oblivion. For my own part, I should like to say that I had much sympathy with Philip's point of view, and was deeply grieved that in his later years at Oxford he was not spared these difficulties, which ought not to have proved insoluble (Harrod 1971: 7).

Harrod pointedly avoided naming Andrews’ enemies in Oxford, who were in fact John Hicks and Norman Chester (see Lee 1993: 22). Ironically, the earliest attempt to formalise the Andrews model, made by the Australian

H. R. Edwards in 1955, had been in defence of his ideas against the very dif­ferent analysis offered by Harrod (see Edwards 1955; Harrod 1952). This was purely diagrammatical, but in the year before Andrews’ death a mathematical formalisation was provided by the Indian theorist Jagdish Bhagwati (1970), who commented favourably on both Andrews and Edwards; a rather simpler Andrewsian model was later provided by Gavin Reid (1979, 1981).

Four years after Andrews’ death, Brunner published Studies in Pricing, a book of five essays, two of which were the text of hitherto unpublished lec­tures from the mid-1960s in Paris and at Harvard and one that applied the theory of normal-cost pricing to the building industry (see Andrews and Brunner 1975). It was enthusiastically reviewed by Alfred Eichner, who main­tained that Andrews’ theoretical writings ‘anticipate what has come to be rec­ognised as the micro foundations of post-Keynesian theory’ (Eichner 1978:

I, 437). These important points of agreement included an emphasis on disequilibrium—perhaps “non-equilibrium” would be a better term—the absence of demand curves for the individual firm outside perfect competition, reserve capacity as standard business practice, price rigidity in the face of demand fluctuations, wage increases routinely passed on in higher prices through the costing process, and (most important) a mark-up model of pric­ing (see Lee 1998). Yet Andrews always kept his intellectual distance from first-generation Post Keynesians like Michal Kalecki and Joan Robinson, and with the solitary exception ofone rather unimpressive chapter in Manufacturing Business, never paid any attention to the macroeconomic implications of his theory of the firm. It has to be said that his neglect of potential allies was not confined to Post Keynesians. He made no attempt to explore the possible affinities with Austrian economics, not even in the more moderate British ver­sion associated with George Shackle, and completely ignored the work of early behavioural economists like Herbert Simon, whose fundamental con­cept of “bounded rationality” had obvious similarities with Andrews' own thinking on the behaviour of the oligopolist (see King 1988: 202-204).

Several Post-Keynesian microeconomists did follow Eichner's lead and explore their intellectual links with Andrews, sometimes in considerable detail. As Fred Lee noted:

[I]n the two decades since his death, increasing tendencies towards method­ological debate in economics were followed by a steady growth of interest in Andrews’ work, particularly among younger scholars, many of whom teach at newer universities. After discovering his contribution (often by chance), this younger generation of heterodox economists has tended to take the view that Andrews’ research output was potentially revolutionary in its content and deserved to have made a bigger impact, especially with regard to developing a non-neoclassical theory of markets (Lee 1993: 29).

In Australia, a PhD was awarded to Juli Irving (1978) for her dissertation on Andrews and ‘the unsuccessful revolution in economics'. Lee himself pub­lished widely on Andrews' work for almost two decades, beginning in 1981 with an assessment of the OERG and concluding in 1998 with a chapter on Andrews in his authoritative text on Post-Keynesian price theory (see Lee 1981, 1984, 1989, 1991, 1993, 1998: Chapter 5). He also co-authored two books, one on Oxford economics (see Lee and Young 1993) and the other on Andrews, which included twelve previously unpublished papers, among them the Groningen Lectures referred to above (see Lee and Earl 1993), together with a paper on ‘the fate of an errant hypothesis', the normal-cost pricing doctrine, with an exhaustive eight-page bibliography (see Lee and Irving- Lessmann 1992).

Lee's lengthy introduction to the 1993 volume begins with a detailed intellectual biography of Andrews and continues with a perceptive extended summary of his contributions. The 1998 chapter ends with a penetrating one- paragraph critique, which notes that Andrews failed to provide a satisfactory explanation of the costing-margin, underestimated the role of social institu­tions such as trade associations and trade unions, and largely ignored con­sumer behaviour (see Lee 1998: 116).

However, some attention does continue to be paid to Andrews in the sec­ond decade of the new century. In her account of developments in the Marshallian tradition in Oxford economics between 1947 and 1979, Lise Arena writes perceptively both on Manufacturing Business and on Andrews' role in the emergence of the new sub-discipline of industrial economics, focusing on the Nuffield seminars that he organised in the 1950s and early to mid-1960s (see Arena 2011: 253-256, 260-261). Lowell Jacobsen (2017) also revisits Manufacturing Business in an article that concentrates on the hos­tility of the reviews that it received from Arnold Plant and Austin Robinson. In a later paper, Jacobsen draws on two unpublished Robinson documents from 1982 which both offer retrospective criticisms of Andrews' ideas on pric­ing and price stability in response to the question: “What remains of full cost pricing?” (see Jacobsen 2018). Meanwhile, the classical-Marxian theorist Anwar Shaikh, in his massive treatise on Capitalism: Competition, Conflict, Crises, makes no fewer than 25 references to Andrews, including—amaz­ingly—two direct comparisons with the work of Karl Marx, in the context of price-cutting competition and “full-cost pricing” (see Shaikh 2016: 318, 334). Of course, Andrews would not have been happy with either of these references to “full-cost pricing”.

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