In a list of 20th-century British prophets without honour in their own land, the name of Norman Macrae would surely be in the top half dozen. The lack of recognition was particularly odd as Macrae was a journalist, a profession cluttered with self-promoting egos, and his subjects — economics, politics, technology and several more — were standard fare in pubs and Parliaments. There was hardly an aspect of life that was off-limits for him; through his writing he changed many minds and opened even more; most of his ideas were ahead of their time; and he was incapable of writing a dull sentence. And yet, in Britain at least, his achievements went largely unheralded.
The contrast was not lost on Macrae — his articles delighted in paradoxes of every kind — but it was easily explained. In 1949 he joined The Economist, then as now a publication without bylines, and did not leave it until he retired in 1988. Though he went on to write several books and a column in The Sunday Times, as well as becoming an enthusiastic blogger, his finest phrases and most original ideas appeared in The Economist. He was its deputy editor from 1965-88, and though he hoped to become editor he never let frustrated ambition stunt the enormous role he played in the publication’s success. When he joined the paper in 1949, its circulation was roughly 30,000, on a par with The Spectator and the New Statesman. By the time he left, its circulation had grown to more than 300,000, dwarfing the other two. It had indeed become, in Macrae’s words, the “world’s favourite viewspaper”.
Norman Macrae was born in 1923 and went to Mill Hill School in north London. In 1935 he moved with his parents to Moscow, where his father was British Consul. The memories of Stalin’s purges, and of Hitler’s pogroms during another paternal posting, fuelled Macrae’s passionate belief in freedom — just as his experience in the RAF, as a navigator in bombing raids over Germany, later turned him against the waste of war. In 1945 he went up to Corpus Christi, Cambridge, to read economics. He was not impressed (“Much of Cambridge’s intellectual atmosphere then was of subpolytechnic Marxism”), and it was only when he arrived at The Economist that all the pieces fell into place and his life really began.
Despite its anonymity, The Economist was the perfect pulpit for Macrae. It allowed him to roam, geographically as well as intellectually, and it gave him the time to explore big ideas, many of which appeared in the paper’s surveys — the only occasion when authors had a byline.
Perhaps the most remarkable was “Consider Japan” in 1962; long before Westerners realised there might be something to learn from that defeated and hidebound nation, Macrae predicted Japan would become the world’s greatest manufacturer. One reader wrote to the editor urging that, next time Macrae went travelling, he should take a hat with him so the sun wouldn’t addle his brain.
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Macrae’s articles were full of such prescience. In 1973, when oil prices quadrupled, he wrote that they would collapse — which they did, just as spectacularly, two years later. When others were extolling the settled borders of the mixed economy in the 1960s and 1970s, he was predicting a global wave of privatisation. In 1983 he forecast the Berlin Wall would come down in Christmas 1989; he was out by just six weeks. He repeatedly disputed the CIA’s analysis of the size and strength of the Soviet economy, and was in due course proved right. And in 1984 he described not just the coming of the internet but also the effects it would have on how people would work and where:
“Eventually books, files, television programmes, computer information and telecommunications will merge ... There will be cheap terminals around everywhere ... [which] will be used to access databases anywhere in the world, and will become the brainworker’s mobile place of work.”
One of the abiding temptations of futurologists is to predict what they wish for, and Macrae sometimes did just that. He had a deep distrust of politicians and officialdom, so naturally favoured a small state. Hence his words, describing a book he wrote in 1984 called The 2024 Report: “The main event of 1990-2010 was that the world’s 60-year spasm of big government disappeared. We stopped letting politicians spend the absurd 45 per cent of GNP in countries like Britain ... and we all came down to more like the 10 per cent of GNP spent through government in America in 1929.”
That was one of Macrae’s blind spots. The other was most obvious in the 1970s, when he urged the Heath Government on to bigger and bigger fiscal deficits in pursuit of faster growth and lower unemployment. It was one of the few occasions where his thinking was behind events. It took him some years to shed such crude Keynesianism and come to accept that his supply-side crusades were the surer path to faster growth.
Macrae was the most generous of colleagues, a much loved figure who in private struggled to string words into a half coherent sentence — until he picked up his pen. He was also an effective public speaker who for years delighted American audiences with his unique mix of eccentricity and brilliance. He was honoured by the Japanese with the Order of the Rising Sun in 1988. Perhaps that finally stirred the men in Whitehall, as he was appointed CBE later that year.
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Macrae had a long and happy marriage to Janet Kemp, who died in 1994. They had a son and a daughter, who died in 1989 when she was 34. It needed a man of great resilience to take such blows, but nobody who knew Macrae could ever doubt that his was indeed a big heart.
Norman Macrae, CBE, journalist, was born on September 10, 1923. He died on June 11, 2010, aged 86