Cambridge 1938: The Crisis of the Economics Tripos?

Abstract

This article argues that in the early months of 1938, the efforts of Cambridge economists to reform the Economic Tripos, or honors degree, were overshadowed by a sense of crisis—the fear that Cambridge was losing its preeminent stature in the field. As archival sources show, several considerations proved to be crucial. Colin Clark, the only economic statistician at the university, resigned. At the same time, the faculty failed to come to terms with the results of a survey conducted by the Marshall Society, the organization of Cambridge economics students, documenting pronounced dissatisfaction with the curriculum on several grounds. Moreover, there was no faculty consensus on desiderata the curriculum should meet or the skills Tripos candidates should demonstrate in examinations. Agreement could be reached on only one substantive matter: the somewhat nebulous idea that the Tripos lacked “realism,” understood roughly as skill in systematic data collection and statistical analysis. On the foundation of this minimum of consensus, the faculty abandoned its attempts to attack fundamental Tripos reform and respond to the Marshall Society Report directly, instead settling on the institutionalization of research and teaching in “realistic statistics” as a proxy. This was the genesis of the Department of Applied Economics.