Sir Hans Singer: the Life and Work of a Development Economist by D. JOHN SHAW (London: Palgrave-Macmillan, 2002, pp. 349)

✍ Scribed by A. P. Thirlwall

• Publisher: John Wiley and Sons
• Year: 2003
• Tongue: English
• Weight: 32 KB
• Volume: 15
• Category: Article
• ISSN: 0954-1748
• DOI: 10.1002/jid.977

✦ Synopsis

Sir Hans Singer deserves a biography. He is one of the best known, and certainly the best loved, development economists in the world. He has spent his whole life working tirelessly in the interests of poor people and poor countries both as an academic economist and as a United Nations official. Like Keynes, his mentor, he has always treated economics as a moral science, attracted to the subject, as Keynes was, by its 'intellectual rigour combined with its potentiality for good'. His published output has been prodigious, including 107 books, pamphlets and contributions to books; 87 reports, and 260 articles-many published in what the profession calls 'top' journals. His colleagues have honoured him with five Festschrifts, and he is rightly regarded as one of the 'fathers' of development economics whose name in the history of thought will be inextricably linked with Prebisch for the first documentation of the declining terms of trade of primary commodities.

One purpose of biography is to help ordinary mortals understand those who shine in their chosen endeavours, but writing biography is not easy especially if the subject is still living. It is impossible to know everything about a person's life, so the biographer has to be selective. If the biographer knows the subject well, it can be difficult to write with detachment; and when it comes to personal details, there are the sensibilities of others to consider. Shaw's biography of Singer avoids many of these difficulties by focusing almost exclusively on his public life and academic work, rather than on close personal detail. Thus we learn a great deal about his professional career and thinking, but nothing about his family, his passions, his hobbies, his health, the vicissitudes of his life, or what accounts for his extraordinary physical and intellectual energy, except his empathy with the plight of the poor and disadvantaged people. Singer the development economist is detached from Singer the man. This is a pity because the author has known and collaborated with his subject for nearly forty years, and it would have been interesting for the reader to know some more personal details to bring the biography to life. There must be many stories and anecdotes to tell, both comical and tragic.

Nonetheless, Shaw has done an impressive job in documenting Singer's professional work spanning seventy years, and his impact on development thinking. There have been three main epochs in his life: first the period as a student and young academic economist till aged 37; second, working as a UN official 1947-69, and third as Professorial Fellow at the Institute of Development Studies (IDS) at Sussex University from 1969. Those who believe in destiny will be fascinated by what Shaw calls the 'twists of fate' that seem to have determined Singer's life: the decision in 1929 at Bonn University to switch from the study of medicine to economics; the invitation 'out of the blue' in 1934 to come to King's College Cambridge to finish his PhD and falling under the spell of Keynes; his fortuitous employment on the Pilgrim Trust Unemployment Enquiry 1936-38. His friendship with David Owen who nine years later managed to lure him away from Glasgow University to the Department of Economic and Social Affairs of the newly-created United Nations, but only because Alec Cairncross was unavailable. Then, through a misunderstanding, being put in charge of developing countries because one of the UN officials saw on Singer's CV that he had worked in the UK for the Ministry of Town and Country Planning and thought that 'country' planning meant 'national' planning. Does Singer believe in fate? Is he religious? We are told virtually nothing about his beliefs, or philosophy of life, except his feelings of solidarity with the poor, his concern for justice and his optimism that good will triumph over evil.

Moving from the study of unemployment and poverty in developed countries to poverty in developing countries was not a huge intellectual leap for Singer, both requiring a similar breadth of understanding than economic analysis alone. Shaw tells that when Singer told Schumpeter, his former teacher in Bonn, that his work at the UN was going to be on underdeveloped countries,