ABSTRACT
WHEN politicians find expert economic advice inconvenient they usually take refuge in charging economists with perpetual disagreement and failure to give authoritative and reliable guidance as to practical action. However, on vital questions economists have frequently showed such unanimity in their condemnation of cherished political fallacies that the leaders of nations would have done well to let the warnings of economic science temper their trust in power. In no case has the reluctance to take advice been more conspicuous than in the question of reparations and War debts. The searching criticism to which this policy was from the outset exposed by Mr. Keynes will for ever stand as a monument to the usefulness of sound economic analysis. Most economists of any standing have since that time adopted a similar attitude, though of course they have revealed various shades of judgement. To the politicians who wanted payments this criticism was most unwelcome, and the verdict of the economists was put aside as irrelevant in a case which power ought to decide and in which economists should only have to give subordinate technical advice. For my own part, I have 100throughout all the different stages of the struggle over reparations and War-debt payments striven to demonstrate the impossibility of fulfilling the claims and the disastrous consequences to world economy which must follow upon any endeavours to enforce payments. The politicians’ usual answer was that such criticism was evidence of an intolerable arrogance on the part of economic science. It is a gloomy consolation now that the predicted disaster has actually come over the world in the shape of a violent and prolonged economic crisis, fraught with incalculable social and political consequences.
