Sir Arthur Lewis – An autobiography

I was born in St. Lucia on January 23, 1915 .  My parents, who were both schoolteachers, had immigrated there from Antigua about a dozen years before.  The islands were dissimilar in religion and culture, so our family had some slight characteristics of immigrant minorities.

My progress through the public schools was accelerated.  When I was seven I had to stay home for several weeks because of some ailment, whereupon my father elected to teach me so that I should not fall behind.  In fact, he taught me in three months as much as the school taught in two years, so, on retuning to school, I was shifted from grade four to grade six.  So, the rest of my school life and early working life, up to age 18, was spent with fellow students or workers tow or three years older than I.  This gave me a terrible sense of physical inferiority, as well as an understanding, which has remained with me ever since, that high marks are not everything.

My father died when I was seven, leaving a widow and five sons, ranging in age from five to seventeen.  My mother was the most highly-disciplined and hardest working person I have ever known, and this, combined with her love and gentleness, enabled her to make a success of each of her children.

I left school at 14, having completed the curriculum, and went to work as a clerk in the civil service.  My next step would be to sit the examination for a St. Lucia government scholarship to a British university, but I would be too young until 1932.  This job was not wasted on me since it taught me to write, to type, to file and to be orderly.  But this was at the expense of not reading enough history and literature, for which these years of one’s life are the most appropriate.

In 1932 I sat the examination and won the scholarship.  I did not want to be a lawyer or a doctor.  I wanted to be an engineer, but this seemed pointless since neither the government nor the white firms would employ a black engineer. Eventually I decided to study business administration, planning to return to St. Lucia for a bob in the municipal service or in private trade.  I would simultaneously study law to fall back on if nothing administrative turned up.  So I went to the London School of Economics to do the Bachelor of Commerce degree which offered accounting, business management, commercial law and a little economics and statistics.

I had no idea in 1933 what economics was, but I did well in the subject from the start, and when I graduated in 1937 with first class honors, LSE gave me a scholarship to do a PhD in industrial economics.

In 1938, I was given a one-year teaching appointment which was sensational for British universities.  My foot was now on the ladder, and the rest was up to me.  My luck held, and I was rose rapidly.  In 1948, at 33, I was made a full professor at the University of Manchester .

Until I went to Manchester , my field of study was industrial economics.

My research work has been in three areas: in industrial economics, which I dropped after 1948; in the history of the world economy since 1870, which I started in 1944 and still pursue; and in development economics, which I did not begin systematically until about 1950.

I was interested in the fundamental forces determining the rate of economic growth.  This was the subject of my so-called classic book of 1955, and also the origin of the model to which the Nobel citation refers.

From my undergraduate days, I had sought a solution to the question of what determines the relative prices of steel and coffee. The approach through marginal utility made no sense to me.  And the Heckscher-Ohlin framework could not be used, since that assumes that trading partners have the same production functions, whereas coffee cannot be grown in most of the steel producing countries.

Another problem that troubled me was historical.  Apparently, during the first fifty years of the industrial revolution, real wages in Britain remained more or less constant while profits and savings soared.  This could not be squared with the neoclassical framework, in which a rise in investment should raise wages and depress the rate of return on capital.

One day in August, 1952, walking down the road in Bangkok , it came to me suddenly that both problems have the same solution.  Throw away the neoclassical assumption that the quantity of labor is fixed.  An unlimited supply of labor” will keep wages down, producing cheap coffee in the first case.  The result is a dual (national or world) economy, where one part is a reservoir of cheap labor for the other.  The unlimited supply of labor derives ultimately from population pressure, so it is a phase in the demographic cycle.

The publication of my article on this subject in 1954 was greeted equally with applause and with cries of outrage.  The debate continues.

My wife Gladys was born in Grenada .  Her father, who was an Antiguan, and my parents had known each other all their lives.  She went to England in 1937 and trained as a teacher.  We married in 1947 and have two daughters, Elizabeth and Barbara.  My travels have meant much separation, but mutual love has supported the family in all its endeavors.

From Nobel Lectures, Economics

1969-1980, World Scientific Publishing Co,

Singapore .  Sir Arthur Lewis died in 1991.

(The Star January 21, 2004)