Robbins blamed state interventions rather than market failure for the Depression

Evidence

Despite the importance of Hayek’s arrival, it remained clear to all that Robbins was the department’s dominant personality. … Denying the common narrative that attributed the recent collapse largely to failures of the market mechanism, Robbins instead cited interventionary policies as the primary culprit. “The cartelisation of industry, the growth of the strength of trade unions, the multiplication of State controls, have created an economic structure which, what ever its ethical or aesthetic superiority, is certainly much less capable of rapid adaptation to change than was the older more competitive system,” he wrote. “This puts it very mildly.” He worried, on the one hand, about the “impediments to enterprise” created by these interventions and, on the other hand, about the possibility of an unsustainable infl ationary boom created by the attempts to address the Depression with a massive program of public works. His policy recommendations included restoring the international gold standard, dramatically reducing restrictions on international trade, preventing trade unions from blocking those who were willing to accept a lower wage, and relaying a clear message that failing businesses would not be saved from bankruptcy. — Angus Burgin, The Great Persuasion, 73

Categorization

• XREF: Robbins’s anti-interventionist Depression analysis connects to later Mont Pèlerin Society positions and to the reader’s austerity/neoliberalism research thread. — connects to: Monetarism blamed the Depression on Fed policy, not underconsumption — Mark Blyth, Austerity: The History of a Dangerous…, 408; Austrian fatalism made Hayek’s side politically unsalable in the Depression — Angus Burgin, The Great Persuasion: Reinventing Free…, 490; Robbins blamed the 1930s depression on social insurance and managed money. — Philip Mirowski & Dieter Plehwe (eds.), The Road from Mont Pèlerin: The Making…, 398 (+2 more)
• SEED: Article angle: how an economic orthodoxy of blaming government ‘impediments to enterprise’ rather than markets became the foundational frame for later austerity policy.

Broader Connections

• Robbins blamed the 1930s depression on social insurance and managed money. #expands (0.90) — Philip Mirowski & Dieter Plehwe (eds.), The Road from Mont Pèlerin, 398
• Robbins recanted his earlier Great Depression extremism #qualifies (0.75) — Philip Mirowski & Dieter Plehwe (eds.), The Road from Mont Pèlerin, 414