23/06/2026
James Meade wrote economics the old-fashioned way – with pen and paper, and working out for himself the answers from first principles.
In October 1977, James was preoccupied with putting the finishing touches to the Meade Committee Report on reform of the British tax system, which subsequently appeared in January 1978. As he wrote in a letter earlier that year, “although I am technically in retirement, I have never, since Whitehall days, worked so hard as on this report”.
One morning he travelled by bus from Cambridge to the University of Buckingham where he was due to give a lecture. On descending from the bus, he was greeted, to his surprise, by a group of dignitaries waiting to inform him that during the journey the announcement had come from Stockholm of the award of the Nobel Prize.
Meade shared the Prize with the Swedish economist Bertil Ohlin “for their pathbreaking contribution to the theory of international trade and international capital movements”, according to the official citation.
Mervyn King remembers James Edward Meade, one of the greatest British economists, who taught at LSE: https://ow.ly/X88s50ZfjzE
