PPE Economics During Wartime and Post-War

During the Second World War, the study and teaching of economics at Oxford, as with so many other subjects, were reduced significantly both by the drafting of prospective students into military service and by the move­ment of economics tutors into the military or government service.

In the 1950s, most economics tutors concentrated on teaching only one of the three PPE components; prior to this, many had also taught politics. However, they had to teach all aspects of economics—theoretical, institu­tional and historical. Prior to the 1950s, PPE students were obliged to study all three component subjects for all three years of study. By the early 1950s, pressure increased to cut this to two areas of study after the first year, to enable the introduction of advanced topics in the third year of the degree. In con­junction, a graduate BPhil degree in Economics was introduced a few years earlier, in 1945, to provide a bridge leading to DPhil research. Now, while most non-philosophers at Oxford favoured the bipartite economics and poli­tics PPE degree structure after the first year, the philosophers were powerful enough to ensure that Modern Greats, including philosophy, was tripartite, to parallel Greats, this being the case at least until 1971. Establishment of a single subject BPhil was thus an important development for economics. This was later transformed into the MPhil in Economics (see Chester 1986: 161-184).

The nature of tutorials, lectures and examinations in economics also changed in the post-war period. Tutorials were directly linked to lecture mate­rials, and examinations consisted of three types of questions—essays, short answers and mathematical—rather than essay questions only. Recommended texts, once based on Marshall and other neoclassical materials for microeco­nomics and John Maynard Keynes and related materials for macroeconomics, changed to Hal Varian for microeconomics and Charles Jones for macroeco­nomics respectively.

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