The first book by the Cambridge economic anthropologist Polly Hill (1914-2004), niece of John Maynard Keynes, the daughter of Keynes’s sister Margaret Hill (née Keynes, 1885-1970).
‘Polly Hill read economics at Newnham College, Cambridge, but did not study directly with her uncle Maynard Keynes, despite her wish to be supervised by him. Hill’s first employment after graduation was as editorial assistant to her uncle Maynard, the editor of the Economic Journal. From 1938 to the end of 1939, she was a researcher for the Fabian Society, writing a book-length report on The Unemployment Services, concerning “the changes that should be made in the unemployment insurance scheme and the Unemployment Assistance Board in a Labour Government’s next term of office”. Although by its terms of reference the book was “concerned with the relief and not the cure of unemployment”, Hill sounded a characteristically Keynesian note that “even so it should be emphasised as strongly as possible … that a Labour Government would endeavour to keep unemployment within manageable limits through a policy of public loan expenditure (and rearmament would not be the only possible form of peace-time public loan expenditure as under the National Government)”. Contrary to Sir William Beveridge, Hill supported proposals to improve the position of women by equalizing unemployment insurance contribution and benefit rates, noting that in 1936 men received unemployment benefits equal to 72% of their contributions to the insurance fund while women received benefits amounting to only 41% of their contributions’ (The Palgrave Companion to Cambridge Economics, p. 858).
From the library of the British economist Alan C. L. Day (1924-2018), a stalwart of the London School of Economics best-remembered for his popular textbook on monetary economics (1957), with his ownership stamp to the front free endpaper.
