Shadow chancellor Rachel Reeves and her husband, senior civil servant Nick Joicey, once spent the evening of Valentine’s Day watching a Newsnight special about the lessons from the Swedish banking crisis.
Reeves recalls that nerdy night on the sofa in the introduction to what turns out to be a much more personal book than its title suggests. Woven through her crisp pen portraits of pioneering female economists, many of whose contributions were never fully recognised in their lifetimes, is another narrative – about Reeves’s intellectual hinterland and how it might shape a Labour government.
From Beatrice Webb, doughty social campaigner and co-founder of the Fabian Society (Reeves was once the secretary of the Young Fabians), she takes, among other things, “her plea that politicians recognise that poverty is structural and the concern of government who can do something about it”. She continues: “dusting off some of those Fabian pamphlets to rebuild a welfare state that treats all people with dignity and respect will be an important priority for the next Labour government”.
Drawing on the work of Webb’s contemporary Eleanor Rathbone, who highlighted the importance of unpaid domestic work, Reeves attacks George Osborne’s decision to pay universal credit not to the main carer in a household – usually the mother – but to the main earner. “Osborne’s Treasury argued when making the change that it didn’t matter who drew the cheque if the money was still paid. I disagree … It has left many women poorer and undoes the attempt to provide some recognition for the caring work that happens in the home.”
From Mary Paley Marshall, the wife of Alfred Marshall and his underappreciated co-author (“a great economist, I think, but a stinker of a man,” as one contemporary described him), Reeves takes the importance of an active industrial policy. “The government has to play its part. With me as chancellor, it will,” she writes.
The segue from scholarly exposition to personal manifesto can be clunky. From the work of Joan Robinson, the great collaborator and interpreter of John Maynard Keynes (Reeves’ “lodestar”), comes the idea of “monopsony”, in which powerful companies can set prices – or, crucially, wages. “There’s a big political and fairness implication here – workers are being underpaid by the market,” Reeves points out, highlighting the importance of Robinson’s work in laying the groundwork for the minimum wage. “If I become chancellor, I am determined to ensure that more people are paid a wage that they can afford to live on.”
Taken as a whole, Reeves’ sisterly romp through economic history amounts to a more thoroughgoing exposition of her own politics and their analytical grounding than most of her peers could muster – including her Oxford contemporary Rishi Sunak (and arguably her boss, Keir Starmer).
There are moments of righteous anger – including over the Conservatives’ cuts to overseas aid, where after highlighting the work of the development economist Esther Duflo, Reeves says we have a “moral duty” to tackle challenges such as high maternal mortality.
Her highest praise, meanwhile, is reserved for the US Treasury secretary and former Federal Reserve chair Janet Yellen, a “Keynesian to her fingertips”, whose focus on “good jobs as well as growth” Reeves says she will take to the UK Treasury – alongside Yellen’s battle to close the gender pay gap.
The need to “end the male bias in policymaking” and “rebalance the economy to consider those jobs that are often underappreciated, undervalued and in many cases done by women”, as Reeves puts it, recurs throughout, and is shared by many of the economists whose work she studies.
Taken together, there is something much more like the outlines of a coherent political project here than Labour is sometimes credited with: one Reeves has been preparing for all her adult life – even before that long-ago Valentine’s night.
Late on in the book, as she describes the influence of the European Central Bank governor, Christine Lagarde – Reeves does not share her centre-right politics but salutes her outspokenness on women’s empowerment – she perhaps tellingly cites a recent interview, in which Lagarde quoted a line from Eleanor Roosevelt: “A woman is like a teabag: you can’t tell how strong she is until you put her in hot water.”
• The Women Who Made Modern Economics by Rachel Reeves is published by John Murray (£16.99). To support the Guardian and the Observer buy a copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply.
