A new biography, [amazon_link id=”0674368134″ target=”_blank” ]Walter Lippmann: Public Economist[/amazon_link] by Craufurd Goodwin, is a very interesting portrait of someone not all that well known now. I ended it appreciating that Lippmann was a more important figure in early 20th century America than I’d realised, perhaps a Martin Wolf of his day. The mixture of intellectual rigour and status with an ability and urge to communicate with the wider public is relatively rare, and important in modern democracies, with all their political and economic complexities. Lippmann was probably the first ‘public economist’.

I was aware of Lippmann only through his 1920 book [amazon_link id=”0691134804″ target=”_blank” ]Liberty and the News[/amazon_link], which for some random reason sits on my shelves, and [amazon_link id=”1484150295″ target=”_blank” ]Public Opinion[/amazon_link], published in 1922. The biography concentrates instead on his books and columns on economics and political economy, tracing the development of his thought as he watched the Depression and war unfold, and engaged with both Keynes’s and Hayek’s work. Throughout the decades, however, in an era when the old order was dying, Lippmann challenged the attractive certainties of the extremes, observing that ‘free’ markets had never existed, and that collectivism relied on censorship, spying and terror. This search for a way to manage the modern economy, and deliver to voters in democracies the economic well-being or assurance they demanded, while safeguarding liberty, remained his theme throughout, above all in [amazon_link id=”1178812782″ target=”_blank” ]The Good Society[/amazon_link].

Lippmann sounded (in [amazon_link id=”1560005599″ target=”_blank” ]The Method of Freedom[/amazon_link]) rather like a modern behavioural economist: “The classical economists over-estimated the enlightenment which is based on self-interest and the fortitude based on self-reliance. … Imitation, the herd instinct, the contagion of numbers, fashions, moods, rather than enlightened self-interest, have tended to govern the economy.” And elsewhere, he emphasised the importance of institutions, regretting the fact that economists had not combined their powerful analysis with a ‘humanly satisfactory’ social philosophy. Economics needed to show concern not only with liberty, but with a ‘concern always for those who could not cope with modernity,’ as Goodwin puts it.

Lippmann, always interested in education and closely involved in the economics department at Harvard, was unable, though, to resist the tide of increasing specialization, to stop the schism between the humanities and social sciences, or the isolation of economics from politics, philosophy, psychology and history. What a shame.

This is a timely biography. Lippmann’s concern to navigate through the real complexities and uncertainties of a transitional, even revolutionary, economic era while avoiding the appealing, easy answers was admirable. So was his determination to explain to fellow citizens the economic debates of the day. Not surprisingly, I find the idea of a public economist very attractive. As a character, Lippmann seems slightly unappealing – brilliantly successful from his undergraduate days on and wholly plugged in to the establishment, he comes across as rather smug, although this is no doubt partly because of my anachronistic reading of his letters as quoted here. There is also perhaps a bit too much detail in the book for the mildly interested reader, although having said that it is well-written and not at all too long. Lippmann is well worth re-discovering as we continue through our own period of economic and political upheaval, and this book sheds light on what made him an important figure who deserves to be better known.

[amazon_image id=”0674368134″ link=”true” target=”_blank” size=”medium” ]Walter Lippmann: Public Economist[/amazon_image]

[amazon_image id=”1178812782″ link=”true” target=”_blank” size=”medium” ]The Good Society[/amazon_image]  [amazon_image id=”1484150295″ link=”true” target=”_blank” size=”medium” ]Public Opinion[/amazon_image]