Does it matter that Britain has never had a female Chancellor of the Exchequer? It’s certainly a curiosity. The country has seen three female Prime Ministers — albeit of somewhat varying tenures — after all. Rachel Reeves, the Shadow Chancellor (and only the second woman to hold even that role) certainly thinks it's important.
Her book, The Women Who Made Modern Economics is part economic biography and part conference speech. With casual references to monopsony, macroeconomic frameworks and MV=PQ (me neither) this is not your average ‘get to know me’ political memoir. Reeves knows economics, and isn’t afraid to show it.
Reeves, who has admitted to “inadvertent mistakes” following accusations of plagiarism first reported in the Financial Times, takes the reader on a whirlwind tour of female economists that history has forgotten, or at least failed to fully recognise, because men got most of the credit. Perhaps the most egregious example is that of Anna Schwartz, who collaborated with Milton Friedman on A Monetary History of the United States, 1867–1960. Yet when Friedman won the 1976 Nobel Prize, he was the sole recipient. Friedman himself later remarked: “Anna did all of the work, and I got most of the recognition.”
Closer to home, there is the story of Beatrice Webb, whose Minority Report of 1909 contained what were then considered to be radical proposals on the government's responsibility to prevent poverty. These would later form the basis of the welfare state, with John Maynard Keynes calling Webb "the greatest woman of the generation".
The book is something of a mashup
But while the focus of the book is on the female economists marginalised from history, Reeves is at her most passionate when explaining why this matters. Not simply, she writes, because greater diversity generates better decisions, by widening the talent pool and hearing from all perspectives. Rather, because male-dominated professions such as economics (and indeed, politics) produce skewed results. It leads to infrastructure being viewed only as men in hard hats and structures that prevent women from fully entering the labour market or rising to the top of their field, whether due to a lack of child care or an under-appreciation of their skills.
The question many readers and policymakers will have is: what kind of Chancellor would Reeves be? More than being a woman, what would instantly make her stand out is that she is an actual economist, one who genuinely believes in the power of economics to improve people’s lives. “Economics is more than lines on a graph or clever models,” she observes.
The book is something of a mashup. Throughout the chapters, Reeves tells the story of an economist, evaluates her work, and then brings it back to the present challenges the country faces today and what she would do as chancellor. This makes it at times formulaic and a little stilted, but hardly surprising for a book in which a clear priority was not to leave any accidental spending commitments.
Of all the questions that Reeves poses, the most pressing one of all is perhaps this: how on earth did the Shadow Chancellor find the time to write a book? Issues with attribution aside, that answer may contain the key to Britain breaking out of its nearly two-decades-long productivity slump, in doing so guaranteeing Reeves’s place as one of the great chancellors.
The Women Who Made Modern Economics (£20) is published by Basic Books
