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An invaluable work which serves as an introduction to the subject and as a reference for all those who need to remain up-to-date with economic thinking.

Contents: Preface 1. Origins 2. The Undergraduate Experience 3. College Fellow in a Changing University 4. Bachelor Don at Large 5. Career of a Moral Scientist 6. Late-Victorian Family Life 7. Academic Administration 8. Faculty Conflicts and Tripos Reform 9. Post-Victorian Academic Family 10. The Impact of War 11. Beacon in Retirement Index

Economists have played a part in the annual meetings of the British Association for the Advancement of Science ever since its foundation in 1833. Indeed, during its first half-century they seem to have been able to exchange seminal ideas with leading natural scientists more freely and fruitfully than they do now. In those days the President of Section F was often a Fellow of the Royal Society. Charles Darwin and Alfred Russel Wallace, the two biologists who arrived independently at the theory of natural selection, each claimed to have hit on the vital clue to their new theory as a result of reading Malthus’s Essay on Population.1 Among the political economists who became enthusiastic Darwinians, for example, was Henry Fawcett, a member of the 1860 British Association audience that witnessed the famous science v. religion confrontation in Oxford between Thomas Henry Huxley and Bishop Wilberforce:2 and Alfred Marshall, Fawcett’s successor in the Cambridge Chair of Political Economy was to sprinkle his influential Principles of Economics (1890) with biological ideas and analogies.

T THE use of estimates of national income or of its major components to illustrate arguments and analyses bearing on the economic strength or the progress of the nation was fairly common during the nineteenth century. Sometimes the estimates were the result of elaborate calculations based in part at least on first-hand collections of data: sometimes they were no more than quantitative expressions of a set of rather general opinions: often they contained elements of both types of approach. It is the purpose of this article, which will appear in two parts, to review the principal serious estimates that were mad-2 by contemporaries and to consider whether they are sufficiently consistent with each other to yield estimates of long-term economic growth for the United Kingdom.'

Over the past decade a great deal of analysis, formal model building and policy has been based on the evident association between capital formation and economic growth. Those concerned with problems of secular stagnation saw the level of investment as a crucial determinant of the rate of growth. Theorists have constructed models on this assumption. Arthur Lewis, in a now familiar passage, has defined an Industrial Revolution as a period in which the rate of annual net investment has moved from 5 percent or less to 12 percent or more. Students of underdeveloped countries have started with Nurkse on the assumption that capital "lies at the very centre of the problem of development in economically backward countries. "2

This paper presents a new annual series for United Kingdom gross national product, at current and constant prices, calculated from the expenditure side. These results differ significantly from previous estimates in that they go back to the beginning of the railway age on an annual basis and also in that the constant price estimates involve a detailed deflation of the main components of expenditure on consumption and capital formation. The implications of the new results are summarised, with particular reference to rates of growth and relative price changes, and an appendix describes the sources of the estimates.