James Robertson, who has died aged 95, was a author and thinker on the centre of a rising motion round a inexperienced and people-centred economics. An affiliate of radical writers comparable to EF Schumacher (Small is Lovely, 1973), Ivan Illich (Instruments for Conviviality, 1973) and Hazel Henderson (The Politics of the Photo voltaic Age, 1981), he wrote 14 books over 4 a long time that had been central to a physique of considering characterised as “new economics”.
A up to date time period for these thinkers was that they had been “futurists”, charting how modifications in financial system, society and expertise would form life to come back. For James, this was to be a brand new financial order, an enabling pressure that will preserve nature. He recognised that the power of the Earth’s assets to maintain financial life – and even our survival as a species – was at stake. Nonetheless, quite than separate environmental from social issues, he noticed them as an built-in problem, open to inventive renewal.
In his 1990 guide Future Wealth, for instance, he contrasted the emphasis on state spending to sort out illness with the thought of prevention and a “health-promoting financial system”. He additionally requested why labour is organised by way of the dependencies of a job, and why we assume that we have to discover an employer to assist us work in any form of significant means. Whereas his time period for brand new methods of working – ownwork – by no means turned public foreign money, he was extensively cited as an affect by pioneers and advocates of teleworking and a rise within the ranges of self-employment.
When it comes to authorities motion, James was a long-time proponent of a “residents’ revenue”, an unconditional fee shared with all adults that will meet their fundamental wants, and he was the primary to discover the case for combining this with two different different financial insurance policies – a land worth tax, as advocated within the nineteenth century by the American political economist Henry George, and an vitality tax, as championed by his German up to date, Ernst von Weizsäcker.
Collectively these improvements would enable for welfare reform and the abolition of taxes on labour and enterprise. The position of the state on this state of affairs can be to behave as a guardian of the general public commons – sharing the advantages with residents and charging those that would take from it, comparable to polluters or land speculators.
A carefully linked trigger that he championed was that of financial reform. The benefit with which monetary markets become profitable out of cash led him to check the scenario to a recreation of cricket through which groups attempt to make runs not by enjoying on the sphere however by betting on the success of the 2 batters on the crease. A primary step, he argued, was for the state to take again from non-public banks the fitting to create new cash. A second step was to permit for brand new currencies to emerge, tied to extra native economies.
Consistent with John Ruskin a century earlier, James additionally needed to revive to the phrase “wealth” its unique which means of well-being. If financial exercise is a results of hidden prices comparable to hypothesis and air pollution, then it’s detrimental to wealth on this sense, he mentioned.
He was additionally a critic of financial progress, a subject of continuous debate amongst inexperienced economists as we speak, arguing that the long run would want to see a shift from an “revenue producing” to a “value saving” financial system.
The long run that James envisaged has not but landed, however the motion he helped to spur stays energetic, and is attracting a rising variety of advocates. One focus space for his supporters is the New Economics Basis, a thinktank he co-founded within the mid-Nineteen Eighties and which, along with his encouragement, I joined as its chief govt in 1992.
Born in Huddersfield, West Yorkshire, to Nancy (nee Walker) and Sir James Robertson, a senior civil servant, James was at Sedbergh college, Cumbria, in the course of the second world struggle and went on to review classics, historical past and philosophy at Balliol Faculty, Oxford (1946-50). After commencement he moved into the civil service with the Colonial Workplace, the place he was supplied with a entrance row seat to view one of the crucial sweeping modifications of postwar Britain – decolonisation.
On the Colonial Workplace he helped to attract up improvement methods for Mauritius and Seychelles (awakening in him, he mentioned, doubts concerning the competence of the Treasury), and in 1960, having confirmed his price, was requested to accompany prime minister Harold Macmillan on his six-week tour of Africa, throughout which Macmillan introduced that “the wind of change” was blowing by way of the continent – a phrase that was devised by James himself.
What gave a private twist to the tour was that James’s father was, on the time, the final British governor normal of Nigeria, internet hosting the prime minister and his personal son within the entourage.
After the tour with Macmillan, James labored as non-public secretary to the cupboard secretary Norman Brook, and remained in that place for 3 years earlier than being posted to the Ministry of Defence. On a path, maybe, to the highest of the civil service, he was, nonetheless, annoyed by the reluctance of these throughout the system to speak in confidence to change. He began due to this fact to query the system itself, and in 1965 left it.
He went on to arrange and run the Inter-Financial institution Analysis Organisation (IRO), a thinktank funded by all the key banks to look at and promote innovation within the UK financial and monetary system, and had his first guide, Reform of British Central Authorities, revealed in 1971.
Leaving the IRO in 1973, taking with him a profound curiosity in financial reform, he turned an unbiased author and lecturer. In 1975, along with his companion Alison Pritchard, whom he married in 1979, he established the biannual Turning Level publication to catalogue and join apply and considering round choices for a brand new financial system and society.
In that context he recommended that decolonisation as a apply might be prolonged extra extensively to society and the financial system. The empires that had been ripe for change had been the cash system, patterns of employment and our relationship with the state, together with methods of well being, welfare and schooling.
In 1974 the Sunday Instances revealed an article he wrote beneath the headline “Can now we have a non-profit financial system?” This prompted the discharge later the identical yr of his brief guide Revenue or Folks? The New Social Position of Cash, an early stakeholder manifesto that turned the primary of a sequence of specialist however influential books over the next years through which he outlined his evolving considering on financial and social alternate options.
Working with the journalist Harford Thomas, he additionally co-edited an Options Manifesto, a prolonged article revealed in 1978 within the Guardian that provided a problem to the considering of the political events within the context of an anticipated normal election. In 1984, when leaders of the G7 nations got here to London, he helped to organise a counter occasion, The Different Financial Summit, which led to the formation of the New Economics Basis.
Tall, gracious and open-minded, he was as soon as described as “that almost all subversive of males, the eminently affordable revolutionary”. The previous Inexperienced MEP Molly Scott Cato described him as “the grandfather of inexperienced economics”.
He’s survived by Alison.
