Cambridge Growth Project: Running the Gauntlet

This chapter deals with the second episode of The DAE Trilogy and narrates the sorry tale of the prolonged demise of an iconic unit of Cambridge applied economics, the Cambridge Growth Project (CGP), launched by Richard Stone and Alan Brown in 1960, and wilfully terminated in 1987 by a hostile Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC). CGP had received substantial funding support from the Social Science Research Council (SSRC) from 1967 onwards under various chairmen and had become the flagship project of the DAE, with an enviable reputation, nationally and internationally. A good many names and reputations were fashioned here, and three “Nobel” economics awards were linked to Stone, including his own. This refusal led to the closure of the Stone-Barker CGP in 1987 with the dispersal of most of its research team; a cumulative stock of intellectual capital and research capacity was summarily lost to the DAE. When Stone retired in 1980, work continued on the development of the disaggregated, dynamic model that analysed the process of structural change in the UK economy—both zooming in on the regional level and also zooming out to take account of the articulation of the UK economy with the European and world economies. Contemporary documentation reveals the wide range of criticisms made by the SSRC/ESRC decision-making Consortium but also records the precise rejections, including an outraged response from Richard Stone, of each of these objections; the defense fell on deaf ears at ESRC. Inter alia, the CGP response challenged and rebutted charges pertaining to methodology and technique, in particular about the value of its approach of disaggregation; substantive issues especially concerning aspects of innovation; treatment of policy issues, especially employment. The CGP reply also raised unsettling issues of procedural probity; of goal posts being continually shifted by the Consortium; of questionable selections of unsuitable and predictably biased experts; of the uneven application of evaluative criteria across competing applicants; and about egregious, gratuitous reputational attacks on the CGP team. It made no difference; notwithstanding the outrage and the clamour, the deed was done and, with the Godley-Cripps Cambridge Economic Policy Group having also been shut down by a similarly hostile denial of SSRC funds a few years earlier, the era of applied macroeconomics at the DAE came to a sad and savage end. A contemporary report in The Economist observed that the ESRC allocation had “revived talk of conspiracy theory” denying funding to units, mentioning both the CEPG and the CGP, to units that “have been critical of government policies”.