Introduction

We now move on to the last period of Keynes’s life as a policy adviser, the period of the Second World War. We are fortunate in having to address us on this topic Professor Thomas Wilson, Adam Smith Professor of Political Economy at the University of Glasgow since 1958. Not only is he the author of several works on planning, inflation, employment, growth and social policy but, more important for us today, he was in Whitehall during the war. Together with other economists, some of whom are here today, he was engaged in the business of economic planning for the war and for the peace. These economists were in various departments, but as one of them puts it ‘brooding over the whole enterprise was the great Maynard Keynes himself at the Treasury’. Professor Wilson would, I believe, prefer not to be called a planner, but he has produced a good many plans in his time, and he has been economic consultant to both the government of Northern Ireland and the Secretary of State for Scotland. He is certainly an authority on planning, which means for him, as it did for Keynes, the regulation of the economy in order to maintain first and foremost stable prices and a high level of employment.