NOBEL PRIZE-WINNING ECONOMIST’S SPEECH
MEADE, James Edward (1907-1995), economist.
Autograph manuscript page and accompanying black and white passport photograph.
[c. 1977].
Manuscript page on onion-skin paper in blue fountain pen, numbered 17, 27 lines; folds, two small holes punched in top left corner; with a black and white passport photograph with ‘J.E. Meade’ written in ink at head; with an accompanying envelope addressed to Karl-Heinz Fleitmann in Bochum, Germany, date stamped from Cambridge 19 July 1978.
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Autograph manuscript page and accompanying black and white passport photograph.
A leaf of autograph manuscript, presumably sent at the request of a collector, giving part of the text of Meade’s Nobel Memorial Lecture, ‘The meaning of “internal balance”’, which he delivered in December 1977. Meade writes: ‘To treat the whole of macro-economic control as a single subject for the mysterious art of the control engineer is likely to appear at the best magical and at the worst totally arbitrary and unacceptable to the ordinary citizen. To put each clearly defined weapon or armoury of weapons in the charge of one particular authority or set of decision makers with the responsibility of hitting as nearly as possible one well defined target is a much more intelligible arrangement ...’.
Meade was a founding father of the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (later the World Trade Organization), and a professor at the London School of Economics and at Cambridge. His Theory of International Economic Policy, published in two volumes in 1951 and 1955, was hugely influential in the development of open economy macroeconomics and to the theory of economic welfare. In 1977 Meade shared the Sveriges Riksbank Prize in Economic Sciences in Memory of Alfred Nobel with Bertil Ohlin for ‘for their pathbreaking contribution to the theory of international trade and international capital movements’.
