A wartime planner blamed Britain’s postwar crisis on state planning itself

Evidence

John Jewkes, Devons’s Manchester colleague who had also spent over a year as director of statistics and programs in the Ministry of Aircraft Production, also produced his “memoirs,” but his recollections were very different. Acknowledging Hayek’s Road to Serfdom, he opened with the following parti pris: … The fall in our standard of living to a level which excites the pity and evokes the charity of many other richer countries, the progressive restrictions on individual liberties, the ever-widening destruction of respect for law, the steady sapping of our instinct for tolerance and compromise, the sharpening of class distinctions, our growing incapacity to play a rightful part in world affairs—these sad changes are not due to something that happened in the remote past. They are due to something which has happened in the past two years. At the root of our troubles lies the fallacy that the best way of ordering economic affairs is to place the responsibility for all crucial decisions in the hands of the State. — Philip Mirowski & Dieter Plehwe (eds.), The Road from Mont Pèlerin, 409

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to Hayek’s Road to Serfdom and the broader Mont Pèlerin critique of planning that this book chronicles. — connects to: Postwar British reconstructionists gave political goals priority over economic cost — Clara E. Mattei, Escape from Capitalism: An Intervention, 181
• QUESTION: Jewkes worked inside the planning apparatus itself - did firsthand exposure to wartime planning convert him, or was there a prior conviction? Worth chasing.
• SEED: A possible essay angle: the insider-turned-critic’s conversion narrative among British wartime planners, and how direct experience fed the neoliberal critique.

Broader Connections

• Postwar British reconstructionists gave political goals priority over economic cost #complicates (0.78) — Clara E. Mattei, Escape from Capitalism, 181