Numbers, Experts and Ideas: International Organisations, International Surveys and Perceptions of the Outside World in Britain, c.1950-1970

"This paper will attempt to build up a picture of Britons’ varying responses to foreign policy examples during the ‘golden age’ of economic growth experienced in the 1950s and 1960s. Britons had long been used to hearing about their neighbours’ altruistic and effective economic and social policies. But they lost confidence in the British ‘model’ during the late 1950s and early 1960s, they turned with even greater alacrity to those countries for ideas about governing the welfare state. Ideas about other countries were not nebulous, diffuse or without consequence. It also outlines the process by which these foreign exemplars fell from grace, as their own problems and paradoxes became increasingly apparent. Given that renewed enthusiasm, this paper will further attempt to analyse the reasons why some policies adopted from continental and American examples were more influential, and more successful in the British context, than others. The author will explore the idea of ‘imaginative geography’ to show how policymakers’ and commentators’ views often reflected their own biases and outlook, rather than the actual structure and performance of Europe’s economies. To do this, it will use examples from macroeconomic policy, prices and incomes planning, as well as educational, regional and government procurement policies. Foreign examples also formed a crucial component in reform of training policy, science expenditure, and administrative law: this paper shows exactly how and why their influence was felt. The particularly fashionable examples of the time show how decision-makers, both consciously and unconsciously, sought out cases that fitted their own ideology and predispositions. Politicians, officials and academics were particularly influenced in this respect by international surveys and reports, published by institutions as varied as the International Labour Organisation, the World Health Organisation, and ‘thinktanks’ such as the Brookings Institution in Washington DC. One especially impressive feature of such work was thought to be the assembly of comparative data: on labour productivity, educational attainment and performance, or on wages and prices. The paper will buttress its analysis of the influence of international examples with an assessment of how important these numbers were in that process. It will therefore reflect on how and why some policy areas were most affected by preconceptions, and others relied on the perceived efficacy of numbers as opposed to ideological predispositions or qualitative decision making. This will follow on from work recently published in the Economic History Review, entitled ‘Towards a New Bradshaw? Economic Statistics and the British State in the 1950s and 1960s’."