As the shadow of the great financial crisis descended on the world economy in 2009, Lord Robert Skidelsky lambasted the discipline he had spent much of his academic life studying.
“I have always regarded their assumptions about human behaviour as absurdly narrow,” he wrote of economists in his book The Return of the Master. “I have come to see economics as a fundamentally regressive discipline . . . disguised by increasingly sophisticated mathematics and statistics.”
No one could accuse Skidelsky, who wrote the definitive biography of John Maynard Keynes, of being narrowly dogmatic — or indeed of dwelling on mathematical models. In a career that spanned continents, academic disciplines and the full spectrum of Britain’s political parties, Skidelsky, who died last week at 86, was never shy of expressing his views or of changing them.