David Smith.
Something Will Turn Up: Britain’s economy, past, present and future.
London: Profile Books, Ltd., 2015.
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David Smith, "
Something Will Turn Up," book excerpt, author's website, 18 July 2015.
Author Information:
Book Reviews and Author Interviews:- "Q&A with David Smith, author of Something Will Turn Up," Profile Books, 15 July 2015.
- Tim Montgomerie, "Book review," The Times, 18 July 2015. (subscription required)
- Gerard Lyons, "Review," The Sunday Times, 19 July 2015. (subscription required)
- David Smith and Sushil Wadhwani, "Something Will Turn Up: Britain's economy, past, present and future," London School of Economics, 28 July 2015.
Event webpage at LSE; Podcast.
This is an audio interview with the David Smith.
- Jim Leaviss, "Video Interview," Bond Vigilantes, 18 August 2015.
This is an video interview with the David Smith.
- Juliette Foster, "'Something Will Turn Up' Book Review," Investment Perspectives, ShareRadio, 01 September 2015.
This is an audio interview with the David Smith.
AudioBoom link.
- Merryn Somerset Webb, "David Smith: things might be bad, but they’re going to get better," MoneyWeek, 16 October 2015.
This is an video interview with the David Smith; audio only also available; and transcript.
Something Will Turn Up is an economic history of Britain since the 1950s, though more detailed beginning with the 1970s as that is the period when the author began his career, first as an economist and then as an economic journalist. The narrative often includes the author's personal experience, first with his childhood in the industrial
West Midlands (and more specifically in the
Black Country, so named because the region was denuded of vegetation and covered in the smoke of coal fires and coal dust) and later his interactions with government economic policymakers. This give the book a more informal character compared to academic economic histories. However, I think the personal narrative serves well to promote a theme that emerges from the book: economic history is not simply a matter of abstract impersonal forces acting inexorably according to some theoretical framework, the view one adopts as an economist. Nor is economic history a matter of mysterious and unknowable forces, or worse, a boring irrelevancy, which seem to be the views of many historians who focus on political, social and cultural topics. Instead we see that the decisions made by individuals drive and determine economic events. Decisions to raise or lower interest rates, to increase or decrease government spending, these are the actions of individuals which propagate throughout a society. So the book is mostly economic journalism rather than economic history.
Unfortunately, aside from describing the sad fates of some firms in the region where the author grew up, the book offers few insights into the development of British business since the relative decline of manufacturing industries during the 1960s through 1980s. What industries and other factors drove the consistent growth of the 1990s and 2000s? This may be self-evident to Britons who lived through the period, but not to a foreigner like me. Smith may mention housing and financial services; but other, science and technology based, industries, such as pharmaceuticals and aerospace/defense, may have had something to do with it. The book does not present a systematic review of British industries. After describing the decline of manufacturing in the Black Country and particularly at
Rubery Owen, Smith writes: "There is a story to be told about a later manufacturing revival in Britain, of a productivity miracle in the sector and of the country’s success in attracting inward investment, particularly from the Far East." (page 47) Smith does not tell that story in
Something Will Turn Up. Instead I must turn to the Wikipedia article on the
Economy of the United Kingdom.
A survey of UK business history is available in:
Geoffrey Owen,
From Empire to Europe: The Decline and Revival of British Industry Since the Second World War, London: HarperCollins, 2010.
[
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In the 1950s Britain was one of the world's leading manufacturers and exporters: "In 1950 Britain had a 25 percent share of world manufactured exports" (page 8). "In the 1950s the trade surplus in manufactured goods was often as much as 10 per cent of gross domestic product (GDP)" (page 8).
By the 1960s and 1970s the awareness emerged that Britain's economy was growing slower than its continental peers France and Germany, that its manufacturing technology was antiquated, and that many of its products were no longer competitive in export markets; for example, Japanese motorcycles were clearly superior to domestic products and British exports were displaced from Commonwealth markets.
During the 1960s and 1970s Britain began opening its economy, joining the EEC in 1973.
During the 1970s and 1980s Britain experienced a turbulent period of economic, political and social change as the government and people adjusted to an economy whose composition had changed greatly from the immediate post-war years.
From 1991 to 2008 Britain experienced a period of uninterrupted GDP growth: "Between the autumn of 1991 and the first quarter of 2008 . . . sixty-six consecutive quarters of growth" (pages 164-5).
Other Books:- Elihu Burritt, Walks in the Black Country and its green border-land, London: Sampson Low, Son, and Marston, 1868.
[Google Books; Archive.org.]
Elihu Burritt (1810-1879), Wikipedia.
This book begins with a famous sentence, famous at least in Britain, or perhaps around Birmingham: "The Black Country, black by day and red by night, cannot be matched, for vast and varied production, by any other space of equal radius on the surface of the globe."
- David W. Bartlett, Modern Agitators: or, Pen Portraits of Living American Reformers, New York and Auburn: Miller, Orton & Mulligan, 1856.
[Google Books; Archive.org.]
This book includes a chapter on Elihu Burritt along with better remembered reformers of the mid-Nineteenth Century such as Frederick Douglass, Harriet Beecher Stowe, William Lloyd Garrison, Horace Greeley, etc.
- David Smith, North and South: Britain's Economic, Social and Political Divide, second edition, London: Penguin Books, 1994.
[Google Books; Amazon.co.uk; Amazon.com.]
- David Smith, The Rise and Fall of Monetarism, new edition, Penguin Books, 1991.
[Google Books, 1987 edition; Google Books, 1991 edition; Amazon.co.uk; Amazon.com.]
- David Smith, From Boom to Bust: Trial and Error in British Economic Policy, Penguin Books, 1992.
[Google Books; Amazon.co.uk; Amazon.com.]
- Roderick Floud and others, editors, The Cambridge Economic History of Modern Britain, Cambridge University Press, 2014.
[Publisher, 2 volume set; Google Books, vol 1 of 2; Google Books, vol 2 of 2; Amazon.co.uk, vol 1 of 2; Amazon.co.uk, vol 2 of 2; Amazon.com, 2 volume set.]
Note: Previous editions were published in 1981, 1994 and 2004; they are collections of different essays on this same topic, the first two editions under the title The Economic History of Britain since 1700.
Economic History: (mostly Wikipedia articles)
Economic History: 1940s and 1950s- William Beveridge, Social Insurance and Allied Services, (commonly known as the Beveridge Report), 1942.
Extract from The Beveridge Report, Internet Modern History Sourcebook.
- Post-war consensus.
- Post–World War II economic expansion.
- National Health Service created, 1946.
- Conservative Central Office, The Industrial Charter: A Statement of Conservative Industrial Policy, 1947.
- Marshall Plan.
- Vernon Bogdanor, "The National Health Service Crisis, 1951," Gresham College, London, 22 September 2015.
Lecture webpage at Gresham College, Lecture number One of Six in the series Political Crises Since 1945.
Economic History: 1960s- Harold Wilson, "Labour's Plan for Science," Speech at the Annual Conference, Scarborough, 1963. [PDF]
- David Edgerton, "The 'White Heat' Revisited: The British Government and Technology in the 1960s," Twentieth Century British History, Vol. 7, No. 1, pages 53-82, 1996. [PDF]
- White Heat Conference, Centre for British Politics, The University of Nottingham, 05 July 2013. [Conference Report PDF.]
- Steven Fielding and Colin Smith, "Wilson's White Heat," People's History Museum, Manchester, 01 October 2013.
Event webpage at the People's History Museum.
Article about this event in The Guardian.
- Theo Blackwell, "'White heat' 50 years on: What lessons can we learn from the 'white heat of technology' speech 50 years on?," Progress, 01 October 2013.
- Harold Wilson: Economic policies.
- I'm Backing Britain, 1967-1968.
- London Gold Pool, an instrument of the Bretton Woods system, collapsed in March 1968.
- Barbara Castle, "In Place of Strife: A Policy for Industrial Relations," London: Her Majesty's Stationery Office, 1969.
Economic History: 1970s- North Sea oil, British discovery in 1970, production began in 1975.
- Smithsonian Agreement, December 1971.
- The Barber Boom, 1972-1973.
- UK miners' strike, 1972.
- Britain joins the European Economic Community (EEC or Common Market), 1973.
- Vernon Bogdanor, "The decision to seek entry into the European Community," Gresham College, London, 14 January 2014.
Lecture webpage at Gresham College, Lecture number Three of Six in the series Britain and Europe.
- Vernon Bogdanor, "Entry into the European Community, 1971-73," Gresham College, London, 11 March 2014.
Lecture webpage at Gresham College, Lecture number Four of Six in the series Britain and Europe.
Membership was ratified by the British public in a referendum held in June 1975 (United Kingdom European Communities membership referendum, 1975).
- 1973 oil crisis.
- Three-Day Week, January-March, 1974.
- 1973–75 recession.
- 1976 IMF Crisis, the British government obtains a loan from the International Monetary Fund.
- Vernon Bogdanor, "The IMF Crisis, 1976," Gresham College, London, 19 January 2016.
Lecture webpage at Gresham College, Lecture number Three of Six in the series Political Crises Since 1945.
- Kathleen Burk and Alec Cairncross, 'Goodbye, Great Britain': The 1976 IMF Crisis, New Haven: Yale University Press, 1992.
[Publisher; Google Books; Amazon.co.uk; Amazon.com.]
- The Great Inflation, 1970s.
- Grunwick dispute, 1976-1978.
George Ward, The Daily Telegraph, 24 April 2012.
- Winter of Discontent, 1978-1979.
- 1979 oil crisis.
- 1970s energy crisis.
Economic History: 1980sEconomic History: 1990sEconomic History: 2000sOther books on Britain, Twentieth Century, noted in this blog: