Editors’ Introduction

In Febmary 1984 one of the most accomplished British economists of the post-war generation, if perhaps not among the best known, gave up the chauffeured limousine that had ferried him over the previous 11 years between his London home and the Bank of England in Threadneedle Street, and boarded the bus — the proverbial Clapham Omnibus — to start the last phase of his professional life in comparative seclusion, doing research at the National Institute of Economic and Social Research (NIESR). His influence and his relative anonymity came from devoting most of his career to public service: first, in Whitehall’s small pioneering unit of economists after the war; then, after a spell at NIESR, at the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) in Paris; and finally at the Bank of England, where he wrote these memoirs.