Austin Robinson is Professor Emeritus of Economics, Sidney Sussex College, University of Cambridge. He was one of the members of the infamous "Cambridge Circus", the others being Richard Kahn, James Meade, his wife, Joan Robinson, and Piero Sraffa. The "Cambridge Circus" was a group of Cambridge graduate students who, during the 1930's, held regular meetings to discuss and dissect Keyne's General Theory and Treatise on Money. In regard to the study of economics, Robinson was "concerned with improving the state of the world--with making it a somewhat better place for the poor as well as the rich."
Before Robinson settled into his life as an academic, he was a member of a team that went to "study the conditions in what was then Northern Rhodesia (now Zambia), where a copper industry was being developed." Around this time he was invited by Chatham House to "do a survey of the whole administration of Africa, south of the Sahara. From this work came the Hailey Survey. When World War II broke out, Robinson realized that , in order to run the war efficiently, "a continuous series of quickly available and consistently defined national income estimates" was necessary. Due, in large part to him, Britain "had the beginnings of the subsequent nearly fifty years of official national income statistics, known as the Statistical Digest. During this time he also became "one of a group of three or four who were sent off to Paris to join up with as many American economists who were to travel around Germany, evaluate the state it was in and the extent of possible reparations." His clearest memory of this time was in "trying to construct a minimum input-output table for Germany and of the fierce arguments with the Americans, who were somewhat influenced by Morgenthau's idea of ruralizing Germany."
The following are Robinson's thoughts on economics, as stated in "My Apprenticeship as an Economist" in Eminent Economists, Their Life Philosophies, by Szenberg:
"I think the first and most important thing is that the responsibility of an economist is to use his brains and capacities to benefit humanity, not only within his own nation, but throughout the world. And to achieve that he must look ahead. Parliament, or whatever the national body may be called, is perpetually concerned with the problems of the short term. A civil service may try to persuade ministers to consider longer-term effects of their policies, but they are involved in the short-term limitations. The individual industialist, consideriing long-term investment policies, can see them only in terms of his own firm and is inevitably ill-informed about the trends of national and world markets. It is these longer-term trends that the academic economist is best equipped to study and, within his limitations, to forecast....My own feeling is that the current work of this generation of economists on this immensely important problem is second rate and inadequate. It is almost wholly macro-economic where it ought to be both macro-economic and micro-economic if it is to provide any guidence to the "where" or to the "skills required". Progress is being impeded because no one has properly studied the long-term income elasticities; thus housing, roads, materials, and trained labour with the relevant skills have not been adequately provided in the right places. If governments cannot or will not provide rational foresight, then I think that economists individually and in their institutes should be undertaking the task. It is rediculous to talk about rational expectations if there is no adequate ways of forming them....I have learned that no economist is more dangerous than the pure theorist without practical experience and instinctive understanding of the real world that he is attempting to analyse, seeking precision in a world of imprecision, in a world he does not understand."
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