Robert Neild
Cambridge economist who advised Labour and also studied oysters and their aphrodisiac powers
ROBERT NEILD, who has died aged 94, was a leading Cambridge economist who also made significant contributions to peace studies – and wrote a social and economic history of the oyster. Neild’s career – as a lecturer at Trinity College, economic adviser to the Treasury in the mid-1960s and professor of economics from 1971 to 1984 – spanned both the zenith of the Cambridge school’s influence on Labour policymaking and the dismissal of its Keynesian orthodoxies by Margaret Thatcher and her advisers.
Neild described himself as a Keynesian empiricist with an “earthbound approach” – meaning a firm belief in the value of real-world research rather than mathematical modelling. In what he recalled as the “snake pit” of the Cambridge faculty, he was by no means as Left-wing as some. But in March 1981, he was the co-organiser and co-author (with Frank Hahn) of a letter signed by 364 economists at UK universities condemning the Thatcher government’s adherence to monetarism and its insistence, in the midst of recession, on harsh deflationary measures designed to combat inflation – a policy the signatories believed would “erode the industrial base of our economy and threaten its social and political stability”.
The revival of British economic self-confidence that followed defied such jeremiads and left Neild’s intellectual cohort out in the cold. But he noted ironically that it was “thanks to Maggie Thatcher” he was able to retire at 60 in 1984 – because she had cut university budgets so savagely that golden handshakes were offered to entice senior academics like himself to go early. Thereafter Neild was free, as a Life Fellow of Trinity and emeritus professor, to devote himself to the kind of research he enjoyed.
Robert Ralph Neild was born on September 10 1924 in Peterborough, into a family with Quaker antecedents; his father served in the Indian civil service and later practised as a solicitor. Robert received what he recalled as an “indifferent” education at Charterhouse – though he felt fortunate to have been taught history by W C Sellar, the co-author with W B Yeatman of 1066 And All That.
In 1943 he joined the RAF, but was invalided out and joined the operational research section of RAF Coastal Command. There, he worked with a team of scientists assessing optimum altitudes for air patrols searching for U-boats and later, in Germany, on the effects of air attacks on ground targets.
In 1945 he returned to Trinity (having earlier gone up on a short RAF course) where he took a first in economics in two years. At the Trinity Political Economy Club early in 1946, he heard a talk by John Maynard Keynes, who was to die in April that year. Though “tired and weak”, the great man “came to life in an extraordinary way … He had a gift with words I have never seen equalled.”
Finding the university an “ivory tower”, Neild moved in 1947 to join the UN Economic Commission for Europe in Geneva under Nicholas Kaldor and Gunnar Myrdal, two of the brightest intellectual beacons of the post-war years. He returned in 1951 to work as an economist in the Treasury and the Cabinet Office until 1956, when he took up a teaching fellowship at Trinity.
But he found the economics school (where Kaldor was by now a big fish), despite or because of its high influence, “awful … savage and full of prima donnas”. He left again two years later to join the National Institute for Social and Economic Research in London, editing its Quarterly Economic
Review and becoming deputy director.
When Labour came to power in 1964, James Callaghan, as Chancellor, appointed Neild chief economic adviser to the Treasury. Roy Jenkins (who would be Callaghan’s successor) recalled in his memoirs that Neild “won the equal trust of Chancellor and officials” – though he was eventually caught up in tangled argument over the merits of devaluation, and in
1967 he changed path again, rejoining Gunnar Myrdal to help run the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute which undertook studies of the arms trade and the risks of chemical and biological warfare.
Neild reverted to mainstream economics when (with Kaldor’s backing) he was appointed to the Cambridge chair in 1971, but peace and war remained one focus of his later work, and he was celebrated in 1998 for an observation on the supposed threat of Saddam Hussein’s biological weapons in Iraq: “To say that the UN inspectors found ‘enough to have killed the world’s population several times over’ is equivalent to the statement that a man in his prime can produce a million sperm any day, therefore he can produce a million babies a day. The problem in both cases is that of delivery systems.”
Neild’s published writings were wide-ranging: they included How to Make Up Your Mind about the Bomb (1981), Public Corruption: the Dark Side of Social Evolution (2002) and financial histories of both Trinity College and Cambridge University. He was a member of the Fulton Committee on the civil service (1966-68) and the Armstrong Committee on UK budgetary reform (1979-80).
Much as he claimed to disdain academic infighting, Neild listed “college politics” as one of his recreations – and the other as “oysters”. Having long wondered why the bivalves he loved were scarcer, more expensive and far less frequently enjoyed in England than in France, he embarked in semi-retirement on a discursive study, published in 1995 as The English, The French and the Oyster.
“The book can be read with reward by gourmets with no interest in economics,” noted the Journal of Institutional Economics, “while economists and other social scientists can revel in its historical and institutional analysis.” The critic David Sexton included it as “a treasurable oddity” in a Christmas round-up of foodie books: as might be expected from a don of Neild’s stripe, he wrote, “it is a triumph for interventionist France … and a disaster for laissez-faire, overfished Britain”.
Indicative of another recreation, not listed in Who’s Who, but for which Neild also had a certain reputation, the book diverted from market economics to explore its subjects’ supposed aphrodisiac powers – possibly derived from ancient myth, but “a more common explanation is that when [devotees] look at open oysters they see a resemblance to the intimate parts of the female body”.
Robert Neild married first, in 1957, the radical American writer Nora Sayle, but they were divorced in 1961. The following year he married Australian-born Elizabeth Griffiths, with whom he had a son and four daughters, including twins. The marriage ended in 1986 after he had a long affair with Margaret Jay (now Baroness Jay of Paddington), who was in the process of divorcing Peter Jay, the former UK ambassador to Washington – prompting Elizabeth Neild to observe that “Margaret is a brilliant mistress but seems to go wrong when she wants to be a wife; perhaps she should stick to what she’s good at”.
Robert Neild married thirdly in 2004 Virginia Matheson, who survives him with the children of his second marriage.
Robert Neild, born September 10 1924, died December 18 2018