Andrew Glyn

Andrew Glyn, (30 June 1943 – 22 December 2007) was a United Kingdom-based economist, University Lecturer in Economics at the University of Oxford and Fellow and Tutor in Economics in Corpus Christi College. A Marxist economist, his research interests focussed on issues of unemployment and inequality. He was Associate Editor: Oxford Review of Economic Policy. He was a consultant for the National Union of Mineworkers and for the International Labour Organisation.

He died of a brain tumour on December 23, 2007, aged 64

He was one of Britain’s most prominent Marxist economists who produced searching critiques of capitalism at the height of the crises of the 1970s and 1980s. But he was, above all, one of the finest of Oxford dons, a brilliant teacher whose talents and intellectual generosity won the affections of his students, even the many who did not share his convictions. A Fellow of Corpus Christi College from 1969 to his death, Glyn’s enthusiasm for teaching never dimmed.

Perhaps fittingly for someone who became an intellectual critic of financial capitalism, Andrew John Glyn was born into considerable banking wealth — son of John Glyn, the sixth Baron Wolverton, a descendant of the founders of Williams & Glyn’s Bank. He was educated at Eton, where he was an accomplished cricketer, playing in the annual match against Harrow at Lord’s.

It was at Eton in the late 1950s that Glyn developed an early reputation as a rebel, joining the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament and espousing socialism. But there was nothing posed about his anti-Establishment stance, and even at this young and typically contumacious age, it was striking that he did not allow his beliefs to subvert a decency and humanity that characterised his entire life.

As a housemaster noted in a letter to his father: “He’s been a good Captain of the House, and the job has done a lot for him, especially by forcing him to re-think some of his liberal principles. Of course he is a rebel which perhaps I mind less than you do! But he is a rebel as a by-product of having a brain which is always working at top speed. . . But what excites me more than his intelligence and his immense guts. . . is his absolute integrity. . . I have had plenty of Keepers and Captains and Presidents and a fair whack of Scholarship winners. It is as my considered opinion and in all sincerity that I say, after 21 years as a housemaster, that they don’t come better than this.”

After graduating from New College in 1964 Glyn worked briefly as an economist for Harold Wilson’s first Labour government and then returned to Oxford to begin research. His principal influences were the classical economists — Smith, Ricardo and, most notably and increasingly, Marx.

His socialist outlook was rooted in part in his voluminous research into the declining profitability of British companies. He was one of the first economists to note the secular decline in the profitability of British companies in the first three decades after the Second World War. He concluded that the hitherto largely unremarked development confirmed the central Marxist interpretation that capitalism was in irreversible decline.

In his 1972 book, British Capitalism, Workers and the Profit Squeeze, co-authored with Bob Sutcliffe, he argued that the political convulsions caused by capitalism’s need to sustain itself through rising inequality would irrevocably undermine its foundations — an outcome that he, like Marx, devoutly sought.

He liked to point out to his students that the aggregate valuation of the largest UK companies at the trough of the 1981 recession was lower than it had been, adjusted for inflation, at the time of Dunkirk. It greatly amused him to add the implication that British capitalists were more optimistic about the future of UK companies on the eve of the expected invasion of Britain by Hitler than they were during the early years of Margaret Thatcher’s government.

And yet it was, as it turned out, at this very moment that capital’s fortunes began to reverse. The assertive pro-market policies of Mrs Thatcher and Ronald Reagan freed markets from their life-threatening constraints and soon it was Marxism, not its rival, that was in decline.

Glyn’s views evolved substantially as profit shares in the West revived and the state-run communism Glyn had advocated collapsed. In his last book, Capitalism Unleashed, published in 2006, he acknowledged that the leading Western economies had proved remarkably successful at reversing what he had believed to be irreversible decline. With a rare honesty he subjected his views to the unforgiving accountability of historical fact. “Old certainties, which I shared, that economic problems would be readily solved once free market logic was supplanted by a planned economy operating according to production for need, now seem far too abstract to carry much conviction or political credibility”.

But he continued to argue persuasively that capitalism was prone to destabilising weaknesses — large inequalities of income and wealth and imbalances that produced a tendency to lurch from financial crisis to crisis — the latter a particularly timely observation given the events of the last year.

No ivory-towered theoretician, Glyn employed his beliefs to practical political purposes. In 1984 he advised the National Union of Mineworkers, publishing a lengthy critique of the Thatcher Government’s economic case for closing coal-mines.

If all this might suggest a worthy and dour ideologue, it could not be farther from the reality of Glyn as a teacher and colleague. His professional life was marked in fact by a personal liberalism, a deep respect for the views of others and a rare absence of self-seeking ambition.

He was, by almost universal acclaim among undergraduates and graduates alike, an outstanding tutor. Always funny, with a baritone laugh that could be heard pealing from his rooms during tutorials in the Corpus Fellows Building, he never allowed his ideological views to colour either the content of his teaching or his manner of conducting it. His primary objective in teaching was illumination rather than indoctrination. Indeed, he could be a fiercely traditional tutor, ensuring that his students were equipped with a grounding in the full range of economic thought, and always demanding — and getting — the highest scholastic commitment.

Perhaps the essential paradox of Glyn’s career was that he was an ideological radical who proved himself to be one of the finest exponents of the most traditional of all teaching methods — Oxford’s Socratic tutorial system.

Though always great company and a loyal colleague, Glyn was not one for the traditional social life of academia. He was more likely to be seen on a picket line at an Oxford factory than at the succession of black-tie events that are the circulation of Oxford life — the formal dinners and balls and gaudies. Yet he happily shouldered more than his fair share of college and university responsibilities with an energy and efficiency that was greatly admired by colleagues. His research was often collaborative in nature and he never failed to acknowledge the contributions of others.

His main extramural passion was jazz. He owned an extensive music library and loved to share his depth of knowledge of the genre as much as he loved to impart his economic wisdom. He once told a student that “the three greatest men who ever lived were Lenin, Trotsky and Charlie Parker. Not necessarily in that order.”

His commitment to his students was rewarded with a fierce and enduring affection. When he received his devastating diagnosis of cancer in September, former students flocked from all over to enjoy his company one last time. Glyn’s legacy as an economist will be significant, though like many Marxists he will to some extent be deemed to have backed the wrong ideological horse in the largest political and intellectual struggle of the late 20th century. But there will be no dispute about his human legacy — the thousands of minds around the world whose grasp of the complex global economy that revolves around them was shaped by one of the most inspiring and giving of Oxford’s teachers.

Glyn married first Celia Laws; they had two children. His second wife was Wendy Carlin, an economics professor at University College London, with whom he also had two children.

Published Books

* "Capitalism Unleashed". Oxford University Press, 2006. [ [http://www.oup.com/uk/catalogue/?ci=9780199291991 OUP catalog entry] . Reviewed in The Guardian [http://books.guardian.co.uk/review/story/0,,1861240,00.html] , International Review of Applied Economics [http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/02692170600874242] , World Economics [http://www.world-economics-journal.com/WEJArticle.asp?Vol=8&Iss=2&Id=295] , and De Economist [http://dx.doi.org/10.1007/s10645-006-9037-7] ; interview and review in Socialist Review [http://www.socialistreview.org.uk/article.php?articlenumber=9792] .]

* "Social democracy in neoliberal times : the left and economic policy since 1980". Oxford University Press, 2001.

* "Colliery closures and the decline of the UK coal industry", with Stephen Machin. Oxford : Institute of Economics and Statistics, University of Oxford, 1996.

* "The North, the South, and the environment : ecological constraints and the global economy", with V Bhaskar. St. Martin's Press, 1995.

* "British Capitalism, Workers and the Profit Squeeze", with Bob Sutcliffe. Penguin, 1972; also translated into Italian, German, and Japanese.

* "The British Economic Disaster", with John Harrison. Pluto, 1980; (also translated into Japanese).

* "Capitalism Since World War II: The Making and Breakup of the Great Boom", with Philip Armstrong and John Harrison. Fontana, 1984. 2nd edition as "Capitalism Since 1945", Blackwells 1991. Also translated into Chinese and Korean.
* "A Million Jobs a Year". Verso, 1985.
* "Capitalism in crisis", with Robert B Sutcliffe. Pantheon Books, 1972.
* "British capitalism, workers and the profits squeeze" with Robert B Sutcliffe. Penguin, 1972.

Other published works

He also published 36 peer-reviewed journal articles, many book chapters and a number of essays. He addition wrote a number of magazine articles and newspaper columns, including those in "The Guardian", "Financial Times", "New Statesman", and "New York Times".

References

External links

* [http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/comment/obituaries/article3147419.ece Obituary in "The Times", January 8, 2008]

* [http://www.economics.ox.ac.uk/Faculty/EconDetails.asp?Detailno=43 Faculty web page]