James Meade Quotes

12 Sourced Quotes

The great majority of politicians and other interested persons tend to.... concentrate on.... measures such as education and training of labour and investment in modern efficient capital equipment.... These reforms are of extreme importance but they are concerned basically with raising the output per head of those who are in employment rather than about the number of heads that will find suitable employment.

James Meade
Now there are two ways in which the authorities of a particular country may combine the use of financial policy and of price adjustment. (i) First, financial policy may be used for the preservation of internal balance and price adjustment for the preservation of external balance. (ii) Second, financial policy may be used for the preservation of external balance and price adjustment for the preservation of internal balance. On either of these principles the authorities of any one country can set about the simultaneous preservation of internal and external balance.

James Meade
[Central banks might have to intervene to counter "perverse" or "grossly excessive" speculation.] By such means, the monetary authorities can attempt to make the market for foreign exchange approximate toward what it would have been if there had been free competitive speculation with correct foresight of future movements. In this case all that the authorities have to do is to anticipate more correctly than private speculators the future course of exchange rates. And in so far as they do so they will make a profit at the expense of the private speculator.

James Meade
On principle i relative prices will be lowered in the interests of external balance and domestic expenditure will be inflated in the interests of internal balance. Internal balance will be very quickly restored although there is no net change in external balance. Relative prices must, therefore, continue to be lowered, which will tend now to produce a boom at home. The inflationary financial policy must, therefore, be replaced by a deflationary policy. In the end relative prices will be substantially lowered, while there may be a small net inflation or deflation of domestic expenditure by financial policy.

James Meade
The frontiers of knowledge in the various fields of our subject are expanding at such a rate that, work as hard as one can, one finds oneself further and further away from an understanding of the whole.

James Meade
[The same transactions are not always] entered in the same category for receiving and paying country.

James Meade
We assume... that the banking system must be prepared to expand (or contract) the total supply of money to the extent necessary to prevent any scarcity (or plenty) of funds in the capital market which may be induced by any other disturbing factor, from causing a rise (or fall) in interest rates

James Meade
He was lucky enough to rub shoulders with a fellow student, Mr. W T. Newlyn, now lecturing on money at the University of Leeds, who was less of an engineer but more of a monetary theorist than himself. Together they discussed how monetary theory could be represented by an hydraulic model.

James Meade
A good book on the subject of the customs union has for long been wanted; and now it is provided by Professor Viner's study, which it is difficult to praise too highly.... Professor Viner's study on the economic aspects of customs unions will be of central interest to economists. Indeed for many years this is likely to remain the locus classicus for the economic analysis of customs-union problems.

James Meade
We shall talk as if the objective of internal balance were simply that of maintaining a level of total demand for all the country's products sufficiently high to maintain full employment, but not so high as to lead to a continuing inflation of money prices and costs.

James Meade
My interest in economics had the following roots. Like many of my generation I considered the heavy unemployment in the United Kingdom in the inter-war period as both stupid and wicked. Moreover, I knew the cure for this evil, because I had become a disciple of the monetary crank, Major C. H. Douglas, to whose works I had been introduced by a much loved but somewhat eccentric maiden aunt. But my shift to the serious study of economics gradually weakened my belief in Major Douglas's A+B theorem, which was replaced in my thought by the expression MV = PT.

James Meade
Any one country can be in any of four possible disequilibrium situations. It can be (1) a surplus country with a domestic slump, (2) a surplus country with a domestic boom, (3) a deficit country with a domestic slump, or (4) a deficit country with a domestic boom.

James Meade