Life, Career, Personality

The sketch of Ian's life below is an inferior substitute for his own 2004 account in Little by Little (hereafter LbL), a remarkable autobiography that combines detached frankness with dry humour.

Ian was born on 18 December 1918 into a large, upper middle class, fam­ily. He writes in LbL that his lineage both on his father's and his mother's side was devoid of intellectual distinction. A harsh judgement but, even if true, distinction as such was not lacking. His grandfather was a general in the British army, his father a brigadier general, and they both commanded the 9th Lancers. On his mother's side, he was descended from Thomas Brassey, the great Victorian entrepreneur, who built railways all over the world. The family was well-off. According to LbL, Ian's childhood home had

23 bedrooms...and an appropriate number of reception rooms, servants' rooms and offices and so forth. It stood in about four acres of garden. There were six cottages, housing four gardeners, the butler, the head groom. There were ten or more horses...two motor cars. Within the house, there were eight or nine servants making about 20 in all. This was all apart from the mixed farm of about 180 acres with another three cottages for the bailiff and other farm workers (LbL 2004: 10).

But family relationships were distant: ‘It was Nanny who was the real par­ent' (ibid.: 15). After early instruction at the hands of a governess and a prep school, Ian went to Eton. He did quite well in examinations but was not regarded as a high-flier, partly because of his inability to learn by heart. He describes himself in LbL as painfully shy and fearful of sexual advances by older boys: he took up carpentry to avoid being in his house during the eve­ning hours.

Ian went up to New College, Oxford, to read Philosophy, Politics and Economics (PPE) in 1938. For some time, he was by his own account a hunt­ing, drinking, gambling man, lacking any focus or direction. Things improved after the first two terms, when his intellectual interests were stimulated by philosophy tutorials with Isaiah (later Sir Isaiah) Berlin, and his friendship with Monty Woodhouse (later Lord Terrington). Even so, he writes in LbL, ‘if it had not been for the war, I would not have got a first, perhaps not even a second' (LbL 2004: 43). Called up soon after war was declared, he served for nearly the full six years in the Airborne Forces Experimental Establishment of the Royal Air Force. At first, he flew autogyros, which were used to calibrate the ring of radar stations that warned of approaching enemy planes. Later, he was a test pilot and flew some hair-raisingly dangerous contraptions such as the “rotachute”, an innovative rotary-wing device designed by Raoul Hafner to be a super-parachute for dropping airborne soldiers, and the “rotabuggy”, also designed by Hafner, that was intended to convert a jeep into a flying machine by attaching a two-bladed rotor.^[139] Much skill and courage was required in these obligatory adventures; he had several crashes and nearly met his death in one of them. Though he made light of the dangers (he compares himself in LbL to ‘a sort of James Bond, before he was even conceived' (ibid.: 50)), the Air Force Cross that he was awarded towards the end of the war was clearly well deserved.

In 1945, he was demobilised with the rank of squadron leader and returned to undergraduate studies at New College.

His graduate supervisor was the eminent J.R. (later Sir John) Hicks, but they got on very badly. Ian was critical of his supervisor's work and Hicks was so affronted that he tried, thankfully without success, to get Ian's scholarship discontinued.^[140] Shortly thereafter, Ian was elected to a Prize Fellowship (a fel­lowship by examination) at All Souls College, Oxford. Isaiah Berlin is said to have remarked that Ian ‘was the most ignorant person to get a fellowship at All Souls' (ibid.: 79). Presumably, he meant that his breadth of knowledge fell far short of a typical young fellow's, but he made up for that in superior ana­lytical power. At All Souls, Ian finished in two years his doctoral thesis, A Critique of Welfare Economics (hereafter A Critique). Though it was largely self-directed, he acknowledged helpful conversations with William Baumol, Jan Graaff and Lionel McKenzie. The thesis was examined by Arthur (later Sir Arthur) Lewis and David Worswick. It was however rejected for publication by Macmillan.^[141] This was a bad business decision: it was published instead by Oxford University Press (OUP) in 1950, became a classic, sold 70,000 copies, and established Ian's world reputation as an economic theorist. A Critique was motivated by a deep conviction that welfare economics had become a preten­tious subject, insulated from good sense.

In 1950, Ian succeeded Anthony Crosland as Fellow and Tutor in Economics at Trinity College, Oxford. He was there for two years, during which he wrote two well-known papers: a review article (for which he retained a special fond­ness) in the Journal of Political Economy (Little 1952a) of Kenneth Arrow's Social Choice and Individual Values, and the paper on “Direct Versus Indirect Taxes” mentioned above. He was elected an Official Fellow of Nuffield College, Oxford, in 1952, and it remained his base thereafter, despite several spells away. After a year at Nuffield in which he wrote a policy-orientated book, The Price of Fuel, he was seconded in 1953 to Whitehall for two years as Deputy Director of the Economic Section of the UK Treasury, under Sir Robert Hall.

To this end, the Rosenstein-Rodan connection proved to be critical: he invited Ian to join the MIT India Project. The Project Team that went to India in 1958 consisted of Ian, George Rosen and Trevor Swan. Ian and Swan established a close relationship with Pitambar Pant, the head of the Perspective Planning Division of the Planning Commission, and became intimately involved with producing India's Third Five-Year Plan. The nine months in India were a turning point in Ian's career: thereafter, he became primarily a development economist.^[142] For Ian, the road to Delhi was to be the road to Damascus. At that preliminary stage, however, his work did not depart much from contemporary orthodoxy, and was supportive of central planning. The India trip also got him interested in the economics of foreign aid. After a three-month tour of Africa in 1963, funded by the Overseas Development Institute (ODI), he wrote two books on the subject (Aid to Africa and International Aid, the latter co-authored with Juliet Clifford). These were sympathetic to the objective of aid but expressed severe doubts about the absorptive capacity of African developing countries at that time.

The breakthrough in Ian's work on development came after his second trip to India in 1965, again on behalf of the MIT India Project.

Both books were initiated during a two-year stint as Vice President of the OECD Development Centre in Paris from 1966 to 1968. They were written with others but Ian was the driving force. The first, Industry and Trade in Some Developing Countries, appeared in 1970 and was co-authored with Maurice Scott and Tibor Scitovsky. Using theory, as well as empirical evidence from six background country studies, it argued that trade controls, and inward-looking policies more generally, impose large economic costs and reduce employment and growth. It advocated radical trade liberalisation, but not laissez-faire: it was explicitly in favour of using taxes and subsidies to offset domestic market failures. It also showed that some developing countries, notably South Korea and Taiwan, were already breaking out of economic stagnation on the basis of export-oriented policies. The book had a huge impact on development think­ing and policy and its message has stood the test of time. There is now a wide consensus that an open trade policy is a necessary, though not a sufficient, condition of economic transformation.

Ian's other outstanding book on development, also initiated at the OECD, was Manual of Industrial Project Analysis II, Social Cost-Benefit Analysis (Little and Mirrlees 1969), published later in revised form as Project Appraisal and Planning for Developing Countries (Little and Mirrlees 1974). It was written in collaboration with James (later Sir James) Mirrlees and proposed an original and constructive scheme of social cost-benefit analysis for project evaluation, sensitive to foreign trade opportunities as well as distributional considerations. It had a major influence on the practice of project selection in the World Bank and elsewhere (see also Joshi 1972). Notably, Ian himself succeeded in per­suading the Indian Planning Commission to set up a Project Appraisal Division.

For many years, Ian's work as a development economist did not give him entry to the UK development economics community. The circle of UK devel­opment economists was then a closed shop dominated by a “structuralist” view that held underdeveloped countries to be a separate family, to which orthodox (and especially neoclassical) methods had no application. The role of prices in economic development was underplayed because they were seen as chiefly to do with distribution, in which regard they could easily be offset by taxation and price regulation. That prices have crucial effects through the incentives that they create for action, however obvious that may now seem, was not then regarded as important.^[144] If Ian's decision to become a development economist gave him no entry to the national community, it proved to be worth even less when it came to recognition in Oxford where, in the 1950s and 1960s, there were two regnant camps: Professor Hicks and his followers, and the develop­ment economics establishment led by Thomas (later Lord) Balogh. The former kept Ian at a distance, the latter met his ideas with active hostility.

Nuffield College was the sanctuary in which Ian flourished. Along with Max Corden, James Mirrlees and Maurice Scott, he made it a centre of excellence to which many of Oxford's brightest graduate students in econom­ics gravitated.^[145] Looking back on Ian Little's life, it is difficult not to feel some sadness and embarrassment for British economics. He rarely received the credit due to him, and even when granted it was often reluctantly delivered. A Critique was not generally recognised as the masterpiece it undoubtedly represents, and Hicks's churlish rejection of Ian's work was a disgrace. But it is in the field of development economics that the embarrassment is greatest, and it is in Oxford that it reached its peak. Ian was a giant of development eco­nomics, and the Oxford colleagues who rejected him and tried to lock him out were shown to be completely misguided. To assume that good ideas always win in the end is too optimistic. However, in the case of trade and develop­ment, Ian, notwithstanding his early rejection, has proved to be on the win­ning side.

In 1970, Ian was elected to the Professorship of the Economics of Underdeveloped Countries at Oxford, and in 1973 to a Fellowship of the British Academy. He resigned the Oxford Chair after four and a half years, in part because he was uncomfortable in the lecture theatre and hated public speaking. He then moved to Washington for two years as Special Adviser in the Development Economics Division of the World Bank. While there, he initiated a research project on small-scale manufacturing enterprises. (After he left, it made slow progress. He returned to the Bank for a few months in 1984 to write the overview.) He retired to Provence in 1978 but came back to live in Oxford after the death of his first wife.

Two of Ian's non-academic positions are noteworthy: board membership of the British Airports Authority (BAA) from 1968 to 1973, and investment bursarship of Nuffield College off and on (including a short stint after retirement).^[146] As a member of the BAA board, he had a major influence in scuppering the mooted Third London Airport at Maplin. He argued that the Roskill Commission had greatly overestimated the benefits of a new airport by failing to consider the use of peak-load pricing at existing airports. The case for Maplin was at first accepted by the Heath government. But Ian advised Tony Crosland, in opposition in 1971, that at most one new runway was needed in the London area in the twentieth century. He describes the ensuing course of events as follows:

Sometime early in 1974 I had a telephone call from Tony Crosland, then again a Minister, asking what he should do about Maplin. I said “ditch it”. He did... If I had any decisive influence on this issue, I reckon I earned my somewhat niggardly salary many times over (LbL 2004: 145—146).

Ian was co-investment bursar at Nuffield College with Donald MacDougall from 1958 to 1962 and Uwe Kitzinger from 1962 to 1965, and investment bursar from 1968 to 1970 and 1990 to 1992.

In retirement, Ian remained active and intellectually vigorous and wrote several major books and articles. The first was Economic Development: Theory, Policy, and International Relations (Little 1982), a brilliant, insightful survey of the field of development economics. In 1984, he was invited by Anne Krueger, then Vice President of the World Bank, to design a large multi-country research project on the macroeconomic policies of developing countries. Seventeen countries were studied. Ian's involvement was considerable. He co-wrote the synthesis volume Boom, Crisis and Adjustment (Little et al. 1993) with Richard Cooper, Max Corden and Sarath Rajapatirana.^[147] In addition, he co-wrote one of the country studies, India: Macroeconomics andPoliticalEconomy, 1964—1991 (Joshi and Little 1994), with Vijay Joshi. This was shortly followed by another book co-authored with Joshi, Indias Economic Reforms, 1991-2001 (Joshi and Little 1996a). In his eighties, Ian edited two books, and wrote two others: Ethics, Economics and Politics, a concise introduction to the interrelationship of the three component subjects of PPE, and Little by Little, the personal memoir mentioned above. He was appointed CBE in 1997.

At Nuffield College, Ian inspired many pupils and colleagues. One of his great satisfactions was that his doctoral student and friend, Manmohan Singh, became Finance Minister and then Prime Minister of India, and instigated many of the reforms that Ian had advocated. Ian's conversational style was quiet and reflective, not flashy; its hallmarks were the discerning throwaway remark, the mot juste, and the brief but incisive comment that goes to the heart of the matter. Despite the economy of words, his presence was mag­netic; and its impact is captured by Francis Seton when he writes: ‘[His] views, however modestly expressed, would command immediate acceptance for their lucidity and independence. He had no need to seek effects, to hedge about, manipulate the waverers, or lobby the influential...nothing seemed more alien to him than showmanship, conformity, plodding exertion, or nail­biting discomfiture' (Seton 1990: 1). It is no surprise that this style did not endear him to the great and the good, and it may account for the fact that, like his illustrious ancestor Thomas Brassey, he received few of the honours in this country that one might have expected to come his way.

Ian's personality was complex. He was outwardly diffident but had an inner core of iron self-confidence. He was deeply serious and high-minded, but he was not a puritan; he loved the food, wine and sun of Provence. He was rather reserved but gave wonderful parties. He had no ear for music but a very good eye for the visual arts. He was well-born but un-snobbish, hated ostentation and pomposity, and believed in taxing wealth more harshly than any of the political parties do today (see Flemming and Little 1974). He was in some ways a correct English gentleman but there was also a wild streak in him, manifested by his love of fast cars and by the houses he designed and lived in, with their lethal spiral staircases. It was difficult to know what was going on behind his steely blue eyes, so people sometimes found him reticent or unap­proachable, or even slightly frightening. But he was a warm and affectionate friend; and in the company of friends he would melt, and talk about people and events with ironic amusement. These apparently contradictory elements did not in any way add up to a fractured or inconsistent personality. They were held together by his personal integrity, his humane and liberal outlook, and his zest for life.

Ian married twice. Both his marriages brought him fulfilment, though dif­ferent in kind. He met Doreen Hennessey, known to friends as Dobs, while he was in the Royal Air Force. They married in 1946. They were a stylish couple and gave sensational parties that came to be known in Oxford as the “parties for dancing economists”. The marriage was not peaceful during its middle years because Dobs was battling alcoholism and depression, but its last fifteen years were serene. Dobs died in 1984. Life as a widower did not suit Ian and, as he often remarked, he was very lucky to meet and marry Lydia Segrave in 1991. With her, Ian became young again. They had two decades of a rewarding and contented life, travelling the world, visiting art museums, doing The Times crossword, seeing friends and working. Lydia sculpted and Ian continued to write. He was very proud of Lydia's talent as a sculptor. She survives him, together with his two stepchildren, and a son and daughter by his first marriage.

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