The Economics of Social Improvement

Robertson worked extremely hard on the research that underpinned his fellowship dissertation. Years later, he was careful to balance some slightly self-deprecating remarks as to its validity with an assurance that he had endured ‘long hours of wallowing in the Economist Annual Histories and similar material’ and had expended ‘a considerable amount of honest sweat over these facts and figures’ (Robertson, 1948a: pp. xvi, viii). In turn, after revision, the work yielded a substantial monograph. Even shorn of much of the ‘consecutive industrial narrative’ that had bolstered the 1913, Cobden Club, version, the book, A Study of Industrial Fluctuation (1915), still ran to 254 pages of main text, together with 27 pages of statistical tables and charts. In an astonishingly short period of time he had produced a major study of the trade cycle, based on extensive empirical evidence, which provided the foundation for all his later work in the field. The book was also to achieve recognition as a classic economic text when, in 1948, it was reissued by the London School of Economics as Number 8 in their Series of Reprints of Scarce Works on Political Economy. Its importance in Robertson’s own scheme of scholarly development was acknowledged 32 years later when he referred to it publicly as ‘my only real book’ (in a speech to the faculty board in 1946, in B2/3 RPTC).