ABSTRACT
Meade's proposals for post-war employment policy included measures for influencing consumption expenditure counter-cyclically, as in his Consumers’ Credits and Unemployment (London: Oxford University Press, 1938). The existence of the Beveridge Committee on Social Insurance and Allied Services in 1942 provided Meade with the opportunity to put forward a detailed scheme. This was submitted to the committee in his ‘memorandum on ‘The Economic Aspects of the Proposed Reforms of Social Security’ (9 June 1942) and elaborated in the two following memoranda dated 21 July 1942 and 10 August 1942 (Meade Papers 312 and Public Record Office T230I101). As a result of intervention by Keynes and Sir Richard Hopkins (Permanent Secretary of the Treasury 1942–45), Meade's proposals did not appear in the Beveridge Report (Cmd 6404, November 1942) but as Appendix II of the White Paper on Employment Policy, Cmd 6527, in 1944 (see Public Record Office T230/102 and The Collected Writings of John Maynard Keynes, Vol. 27, London: Macmillan, 1980, Chapters 4 and 5).
