Barbara Wooteen's lament for economics and vision of a social economics

The British social economist Barbara Wootton (1897–1988), engaged in a searching critique of the narrowness and abstraction of Neoclassical orthodoxy in herLament for Economics (1938), which was provoked by Robbins'Essay on the Nature and Significance of Economic Science, and in her reply to Hayek'sThe Road to Serfdom. Her participation in Beveridge's wartime “brains trust” resulted in her Fabian Society pamphlet,Full Employment (1943). This paper examines Wootton's critique of Neoclassical Economics; her vision of a broader, more realistic social economics; her attempts to apply that vision of social economics inThe Social Foundations of Wages Policy (1955), andIncomes Policy (1974), and parallels between her work and North American developments in social economics. *** DIRECT SUPPORT *** A03DH034 00003