Professor Sir Henry Phelps Brown (born 10 February 1906; died 15 December 1994) was a prominent British economist.
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Phelps Brown was born in Calne, Wiltshire[1] He won a scholarship to The Taunton Academy before winning an open scholarship to Wadham College at Oxford University to study first history, and then politics philosophy & economics.[2] He won a half blue for cross country running in 1926, and was Secretary of the Oxford Union in 1928.
Directly following completion of his undergraduate studies in 1929, Phelps Brown was named a Fellow of the New College, where he taught economics from 1930 to 1947, following a year in the United States as a Rockefeller Travelling Fellow.[1] .[2]
Phelps Brown joined the British Army at the outbreak of World War II and was commissioned as a Second Lieutenant in the Royal Artillery.[1] This followed a failed attempt to present himself for service in the Board of Trade as an economic statistician. The chief statistician at that beginning of the war was attempting to reduce the work-force and was releasing statisticians for other war-related work, and by the time a new chief statistician was in place and looked to hire statisticians again, Phelps Brown was embedded with his unit and chose not to leave them.[1] In November 1939 he was posted to France as part of the British Expeditionary Force, and then in 1940 evacuated from Dunkirk.Following a period anti-aircraft gunning around London during the Blitz, in January 1943 he took part in the Operation Torch landings in Algeria, and subsequently in Tunisia became part of the 8th Army. With this formation he took part in the invasion of Sicily and the subsequent campaign in Italy, where he took part in battles such as Monte Cassino. His unit fired their guns for the last time at the crossing of the River Po, by which time he was an acting Lieutenant Colonel commanding a battalion. At the end of the war, he was awarded the MBE.[1]
Phelps Brown returned to Oxford after the war, but had lost seniority to those professors who had remained at home, so in 1947 he left Oxford to accept an appointment as Professor of the Economics of Labour at the London School of Economics (LSE).[2]
In 1960 he was elected a Fellow of the British Academy.
Phelps Brown remained at LSE until his retirement in 1968, at which time he returned to live in Oxford and spent the last 20 years of his life writing on various economic topics.[1]
From 1970-72 he was President of the Royal Economic Society.
In 1976 he received a knighthood for his services to economics.
Phelps Brown is remembered as a careful and diligent teacher who prepared extensive notes for his students,[1] and as a researcher who tied economics to social science to assess the impacts of economic theory on the lives of everyday people.[2]
Phelps Brown was called upon by the British government on several occasions. In 1957, the Macmillan government formed the Council on Prices, Productivity and Incomes to monitory wage/price fluctuations. Phelps Brown was called to serve on this council, and sought to use an incomes policy to reduce inflation without driving higher unemployment.[1] He was later called to help form the National Economic Development Council in 1962, and once again in 1974 to serve on the Royal Commission on Income and Wealth.[1]
Phelps Brown wrote extensively on various topics in Economics and History, including textbooks and instructional aids as well as scholarly volumes and one novel based on his experiences in World War II.[1]
The following is only a sampling of Phelps Brown's many books and articles.
Phelps Brown suffered a stroke in 1990.[1] He died in December 1994.
Phelps Brown married Dorothy Evelyn Mostyn Bowlby (daughter of surgeon Sir Anthony Bowlby, and sister of child psychologist John Bowlby) in 1932, and remained married to her until his death.[1] They had three children.[1]