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‘Wilson … is surely my star pupil’
As Wilson was preparing to leave Australia to study, Copland was readying himself for the same purpose. Copland might have borne a professorial title, but he also had several resemblances to the raw research student packing for Oxford. Like Wilson, he was young: only thirty-one years old. Like Wilson, he was an antipodean who had never left Australasia. Like Wilson, he wanted to undertake ‘further study’, and had been considering undertaking a doctorate at the London School of Economics (Hodgart 1975, p. 4). Copland may have had the dignity and income of a Chair, but his psychology was still that of a youthful direction seeker. This chapter, then, is the story of two young Australians making their voyage of discovery in the wider world.
Unlike Giblin or Brigden, the two were travelling the world in time of peace, rather than war. But the dislocation of the war, and the attempts to surmount and efface it, were to leave a strong impression on their ‘further study’. On the eve of their journeys, on 28 April 1925, Winston Churchill, as Chancellor of the Exchequer, made an announcement of general significance for the world, and of a more professional significance for the two travelling scholars. In an effort to re-establish peacetime normality the gold standard would be restored with immediate effect, and the gold value of a pound sterling fixed.[1] This decision has been confidently judged to be damaging to Britain’s economy, and has been (more speculatively) blamed for the Wall Street boom and the subsequent crash that was to demolish all hopes for the old financial order. Such attempts of Churchill to make good the impact of the war were to preoccupy the thoughts of all four in the 1920s.
Their thinking left marks on economic doctrine – especially on the linkage of capital inflow, the terms of trade, and the real exchange rate – long after the effects of the First World War had been submerged. In the 1970s the linkages traced out by Wilson and the others took on a renewed life as key elements in the analysis of the ‘Dutch Disease’ and the ‘Gregory Thesis’.
When Wilson arrived in Oriel College towards the end of 1925, economics was stirring at Oxford. An ‘honours school’ in Politics, Philosophy and Economics had been created in 1920, and ‘the almost irresistible rise of economics in PPE’ had commenced. The old subject of Political Economy had been renamed, and Modern Statistical Methods were being taught. Roy Harrod was lecturing on Money, Banking and Currency, and International Economics. One future Nobel Laureate, James E. Meade, was a fellow student of Wilson’s at Oriel, although still a disciple of Major Douglas, and still absorbed in classical studies.[2] Wilson bought Keynes’ Tract on monetary reform.
Oxford rewarded Wilson. He won the Beit Prize in Colonial History with an essay entitled ‘Social and economic experiments in Queensland’. He began the dissertation proposed by Cannan, ‘The import of capital’, spent long days in the Royal Colonial Institute and the British Museum accumulating data, and successfully submitted his DPhil in October 1929.
But Wilson was not entirely content with Oxford. His tutor at Oriel was inexperienced and ‘knew nothing about the subject I was interested in’. And there were deficiencies in physical as well as human capital. ‘I couldn’t find a calculating machine in Oxford, they looked horrified at me when I asked’ (Wilson 1984). Wilson was offered some seven-figure logbooks instead. In 1920s Oxford, it was all done by pencil.
And he had discovered America. In 1926, as a member of a student debating group assembled under the auspices of the English Speaking Union, he visited 38 universities in six weeks. He felt he was ‘treated as royalty’. This was the beginning of a lifelong attraction to the United States.
He successfully applied for a ‘Commonwealth Fund Scholarship’[3] to study in the United States. The University of Chicago seemed to be the right place to go. The physical capital was impressive. ‘The first compulsory thing when I hit Chicago was to be driven over to the Commerce School and instructed how to work a few calculating machines. The facilities in Chicago were quite excellent for the day. They had a marvellous machine [that did] six figures by six figures by pushing a button and tot up the total for you’ (Wilson 1984). And here was an intensity lacking at Oxford; in addition to final examinations, he faced quarterly examinations in subjects with such inhospitable titles as Economic Theory. There were new fangled topics: Industrial Organisation and Relations, presumably taught by a professor he was to befriend, Paul Douglas,[4] best recalled today for bestowing his name to the Cobb-Douglas production function. But, above all, there taught at Chicago Jacob Viner, who had just published Canada’s balance of international indebtedness, ‘which was very much on the same sort of lines I was working on’.
Viner was not easily impressed by would-be scholars. One former student of his, James Buchanan, recalled many years later that Viner felt it his ‘sacred duty’ to annihilate his students’ confidence. But Viner held Wilson to be ‘one of the two or three best students I have ever encountered’ (quoted in Cornish 2002, p. 14).[5] Wilson was awarded a PhD for his topic, ‘Capital movements and their economic consequences’, which Viner in his Studies in International Trade commended as ‘a distinct advance over previous attempts’.
Wilson was never a scholar in the closet. One acquaintance recalls his first meeting with him:
[I] had never met anyone quite like him. With his (almost perpetual) cigarette in one hand, a Scotch (or was it an Australian beer?) in the other, he was delivering himself of the most outlandish stories of whatever Conference he and the Treasurer had just been attending – all in that slightly husky, even graveley voice which so well befitted the lapidary comments he was making. (Stone 1997, p. 5).
Yet Wilson was not truly gregarious. He was uninterested in the nuzzling fellowship of the herd. He was drawn to a particular species of sociality – competitive sociality. This was often physical – tennis, table tennis, skating, billiards. But if he found little reward in simple familiarity and companionability, he was still capable of intimacy. He wrote regularly to his family ‘[his letters] are deeply personal and record the exceptionally close family relationship enjoyed by Wilson, especially with his father’ (Cornish 2002, p. 15).[6] In Denver he met Valeska Thompson, an American, who was to follow him back to Chicago. They married in June 1930.