The development of economic ideas over the long-term
As Utilitarian economics had been brilliantly cultivated by British thinkers, it would seem inevitable for it to be reproduced in Australia. But the advent of any economics would not be a simple matter of the transportation of a doctrine from Britain to Australia, and the story of Australian economics opens with something of a false start: the passage across the Australian scene of three political economists of at least some world renown, W.S.Jevons (1835—82), W.E.
Hearn (1826-88) and David Syme (1827-1908). In this episode of the pre-history of Australian economics, Australia, still more a frontier than a community, was effectively giving space for some of the wayward energy of the metropolis to express itself. But that very frontier character meant that there was little local institutional netting for their ideas to fasten to, and the promise of their fortuitous arrival was not obviously realised.Syme, Jevons and Hearn — a Scotsman, an Englishman and an Irishman — were born within eight years of one another; all arrived in the wave of Gold rush emigration (Syme — 1852, Jevons — 1854, Hearn — 1855); and all were attracted to dissent in ‘political economy'. All three, indeed, proposed new names for the discipline. Syme favoured ‘Industrial Science', and it is on account of his Outline of Industrial Science (1877) that David Syme ‘was known to many who would have been unable to name the capital of Victoria' (La Nauze, 1949). A brilliantly successful Melbourne newspaper proprietor, and friend of T.E. Cliffe Leslie, his fluent and glib prose does not attempt to theorise, but discharges a methodological critique of classical economics. But Syme's greater significance of the story of Australian economics lies in ‘rare friendship' that he nurtured with Alfred Deakin. Rescuing him from legal failure, Syme employed Deakin in his mouthpiece, The Age, and converted him to protectionism, and in some way made Deakin the political embodiment of ‘the Australian ideology'.
A far fainter impress on Deakin's mind was evidently made by W.E. Hearn, who taught the future prime minister free trade doctrines as the professor of ‘modern history and literature, political economy and logic' from 1855 to 1873 at the newly established University of Melbourne. Hearn is, indeed, not remembered as a dispenser of standard classical policy prescriptions, but as the author of Plutology or the Theory of the Efforts to Satisfy Human Wants of 1863. An exercise in subjectivism without marginalism, Plutology’s ‘curiously Jevonian' echoes (Schumpeter, 1954, 826) received the praise of Marshall, Edgeworth and Jevons (Moore, 2002). Yet it has no ‘analysis'. Neither need we marvel at what Hearn did achieve, since as former student in the Trinity College, Dublin, Hearn was ‘almost bound to be exposed to the infection of utility theory' (La Nauze, 1941, 257).
It is a teasing possibility that one of Hearn's students could well have included W.S. Jevons. For it was only after some indecision that Jevons in 1859 declined an offer of a generous position at the Melbourne mint, and instead returned to England, certainly without any contact with Hearn. The problem therefore that arises from Jevons' five-year sojourn in Sydney (1854—59) is, what significance — if any — might it hold for the genesis of his ‘true theory' of political economy that he struck upon within 12 months of departing Australia? (see White, 1982, 2006). The most Jevons allowed for Australia is that it rendered ‘peculiar service' by giving time to ‘mature' his powers. We are really in matters of psycho-biography than intellectual history, and it is for others to divine the meaning ofJevons' remark on his arrival in England that he felt as if he had ‘dreamt a great deal in a very short time' (5 October 1859, in Jevons, 1972).
What ifJevons had stayed? ‘I could not have done much in Sydney', judged Jevons. ‘I thought what I did very clever then, but it seems foolishness to me now'. A more objective indicator of the counter-factual may lie in the career of Alfred De Lissa (1838—1913). Both De Lissa and Jevons were religiously unorthodox; both attended University College at the same time; both had bankrupt fathers; and both arrived in Sydney, within a year of each other, in the wake of the gold rushes. But unlike Jevons, De Lissa stayed in Sydney, and nevertheless achieved something ‘clever'. In 1890 De Lissa proclaimed in the Australian Economist a ‘Law of Incomes', in which the impact on national income of any shock to primary production was a multiple of that shock (Goodwin, 1966). De Lissa's algebra not only sharply reminds the modern reader of the Keynesian multiplier, it was a sensible modelling of Australian national income. But it sank without trace, as did the prematurely launched Australian Economic Society (1888—98) and its organ, the Australian Economist (N.G. Butlin, 1988; SJ. Butlin, 1988).