As student, colleague and friend of Max Corden for over half a century, I am honoured to be invited to review his autobiography.
The book is in two distinct parts: (I – The Early Years and (II – Being an Academic Economist. Max’s extreme distinction as an academic economist is renowned world-wide and, in the words of Martin Wolf, he is indeed Australia’s greatest living economist. The Early Years are less well-known but, to this reviewer, they are the fascinating part of this book and, accordingly, I will concentrate on Part I.
Werner Max Cohn, as he was then, was born in Breslau (nowadays Polish Wroclaw) then the capital of Silesia province, the second largest city in Prussia and the eighth largest in Germany. The Jewish community in Breslau, to which Max belonged numbered some 24,000 and was the third largest of its kind in Germany. Without ever denying his Jewishness, Max always thought of himself as a German Jew.
After the 1933 rise of the Nazi regime of Germany, the Nazis began to discriminate against Jews. Max’s father, Rudolf, was dismissed from his job and the family decided to emigrate (along with any others). Max’s elder brother, Gerhart (Gerald), was sent to school in England and a year later young Werner (Max) aged 10 was sent to a preparatory school in Westgate-on-Sea in Kent. Max escaped from Germany just in time. On 9 November 1938 occurred the infamous Kristallnacht, which was an explosion of Nazi hate of Jews. They arrested some 30,000 Jews, of whom Max’s father was one, but they could be released if emigrating. Australia agreed to take 5000 Jewish refugees, including the Cohn family; in December 1938, they sailed for Australia on the MS Sibajak.
Max never ceased to be aware of the family’s luck in getting out of Germany in time. The Dutch ship Sibajak took 148 German Jews to Australia. At Colombo, the Cohn family stayed one night at the Grand Oriental Hotel and then proceeded to Australia on the British ship Oronsay. They touched Australian soil in Fremantle on 17 January 1939 and then disembarked in Melbourne on 25 January. They were driven down the St Kilda Road, ‘… the most beautiful street in the world’, according to Max’s father Rudolf. After a few weeks in a boarding house, the Cohn family moved to a rented house in Evelyn Street, St Kilda. Soon afterwards, they changed their names. The surname became Corden. Gerhart became Gerald and Max became Warner, the name of a popular Hollywood actor, Warner Baxter. Max did not like that choice and so decided to go by his middle name of Max. In 1944, the Cohns became naturalised Australians. At that time, Rudolf was a corporal in the Australian army; he had previously been a corporal in the Kaiser’s army in the First World War.
Max ceased to be a believer in the Jewish faith and stopped attending the synagogue after 1940. Around then, he went Caulfield North Central School and in 1942 proceeded to the selective Melbourne High School in South Yarra. On the basis of very good results in his final year there, he got a senior government scholarship to the University of Melbourne and a residential scholarship to Queen’s College. Although desiring to study British and European history, Max took the advice of his father that job prospects would be better with a commerce degree. That degree in Melbourne included a large amount of economics, and that is how Max became an economist.
Part II, Being an Academic Economist, covers Max’s years at the London School of Economics (LSE), The UK National Institute of Economic and Social Research, The University of Melbourne, The Australian National University (ANU), Nuffield College Oxford, the International Monetary Fund and John Hopkins University (both in Washington, D.C.). Each of these is dealt with in very full chapters so there is no point to descend to details here; however, these chapters are of much interest and should be read. The ANU chapter not only describes Max’s notable research there (in particular on the Dutch Disease), but also includes his pen portraits of professors Sir John Crawford and Heinz Arndt.
Max’s first venture as an economics author was his Melbourne Master of Commerce thesis, ‘The Economics of the Australian Press’, from which he extracted a short theoretical article. Max hoped to publish that article and sought advice from Professor Wilfred Prest, the wise head of Melbourne’s department of economics. Prest showed interest and said that when shortly he went on leave to England he would show it to Ursula Hicks, editor of the Review of Economic Studies. On learning that Max also intended a holiday visit to London, Prest advised him to apply for a British Council scholarship to study at the LSE. Max did so and was duly awarded a scholarship, admitted to the LSE and arrived in London in May 1953. As a student in the LSE, Max was supervised by the ‘great and modest’ James Meade, whom he greatly admired and who received the Nobel Prize in Economics in 1977. Meade steered Max into the PhD programme and his thesis ‘Population Increase and Foreign Trade’ passed readily.
Before leaving Melbourne for London, Max met and fell in love with Dorothy Martin. She came to London in 1955 and married Max on 1 June 1957. The couple returned to Melbourne University at the beginning of 1958, where Max took up a job in the Department of Commerce under Donald Cochrane. At that time, Max’s main research and writing was about Australian tariff policy. His work had a significant influence on Australian discussion and actual policy. The concept of ‘effective protection’ is generally associated with Max; he did not invent it but was the most prominent expositor of the concept. Thanks to the distinguished Canadian economist, Harry Johnson, Max’s important article on effective protection was published in the Journal of Political Economy in 1966. The essence of this and other notable articles by Max in the 1960s is contained in his first book, The Theory of Protection (1971).
I am not alone in thinking that Max was the best of teachers; Melbournians Charles Goode, Bob Gregory and the late Richard Snape shared this view, as did many others. In the Foreword to this book, Martin Wolf writes that ‘Max was far and away the best teacher and most lucid expositor I met during my time in Oxford’. Max’s lectures, like his writings were most orderly. Wolf writes that both were marked by ‘… the maximum of clarity with the minimum of unnecessary complexity’. All Max’s presentations, in person or in writing were models of rigour and clarity as exhibited in his book Trade Policy and Economic Welfare, which Wolf judged to be Max’s masterpiece.
This book concludes with three delightful pages called ‘All about luck’, in which Max disarmingly credits the many people who gave him advice and assistance throughout his distinguished career. Yes, it has been All About Luck but has also been about his great intellect, diligent work, morality and integrity. Thank you, Max, we are all better for knowing you.
