72 Books & arts The EconomistAugust 31st 2019
2 efficiency. They and their disciples worked
to turn legal attitudes to antitrust on their
head, allowing decades of corporate con-
centration and increasing market power.
That is not the half of it. Economists
helped engineer a wave of deregulation
from the 1970s to the 1990s, and provided
the intellectual case for tax cuts from the
1960s to the 1980s (much of which this
newspaper applauded). All this yielded
many benefits: deregulating airlines, to
take just one example, made flights cheap-
er and more accessible. But overall growth
never rose as some promised. Inequality
widened. Workers and communities in-
creasingly lost out to firms.
Even the profession’s triumphs deserve
reconsideration, Mr Appelbaum suggests.
Economists are proud of their role in the
defeat of double-digit inflation in the early
1980s. Yet the recessions stoked by moneta-
rism did immense harm. Unemployment
soared, and many manufacturing towns
hurt by appreciating currencies never re-
covered. Economists are often quick to dis-
miss the possibility that inflation might
eventually have fallen on its own, as the ef-
fects of high oil prices and elevated defence
spending abated.Negative externalities
Could a band of social scientists really
wreak so much havoc? Mr Appelbaum’s
book places economists at the centre of the
story, but they were often mere accom-
plices to a broader movement of conserva-
tives determined to reverse the encroach-
ment of the state. Free-market economists
received financial support from business
leaders who were more passionate about
reducing tax and regulation than about
high-minded research. Joseph Coors, a
beer magnate, created the Heritage Foun-
dation as a sort of public-relations firm for
capitalism. It was soon publishing econo-
mists with friendly messages. “Let’s get
taxes cut under any and all circumstances,”
Friedman wrote for the think-tank in 1978.
Rather than being the tale of an academic
discipline’s unlikely rise to influence, Mr
Appelbaum’s book can be seen as an ac-
count of the easy ascent of a few ideas that
appealed to the wealthy and powerful.
Still, the part played by others does not
get the economists off the hook. Many (of
assorted political persuasions) laboured
quietly to produce valuable research. But
some leading lights ignored critics, includ-
ing within the profession, who warned that
their clever theories did not adequately
capture society’s complexities. Too many
were too impressed with their own intelli-
gence to consider the unintended conse-
quences of their policies. Too few reflected
on the implications of the politics that al-
lowed them to enact their ideas.
Often, their theories operated on the as-
sumption that the self-interested actionsof the rich would benefit everyone, even as
those self-interested rich used the same
economists to pursue their own agenda.
The end of the economists’ hour has
created room within the field for views that
long struggled to get a hearing. But, in an
age of nativism and protectionism, other
ways of seeing the world now predomi-
nate. It may be some time before the dismal
science gets a chance to set things right. 7A
family is a little kingdom, Samuel
Johnson noted, and in the mercantile
principality of Gluckstein and Salmon, the
heraldic emblem might have been a sheaf
of sticks. A father hands his sons some
twigs, Monte Gluckstein once told his
nephew, drawing on Aesop’s fable. Break
one, the father orders. They do. He bundles
the sticks. Now break them, he says.L’un-
ion fait la force—“Strength in unity”—was
the family motto, explained Monte, third-
generation scion of a catering empire.
Thomas Harding mined the traumatic
history of his father’s family in Germany in
“The House by the Lake”. In “Legacy” he ex-
plores his maternal lineage—an arc span-
ning five generations from immigrants to
tycoons. The Glucksteins and Salmonsfounded Lyons, a firm that shaped British
tastes, catered for Buckingham Palace and
owned a hit parade of mega-brands.
The saga was launched by the flight of a
young Hebrew teacher named Lehmann
Gluckstein from eastern Europe in the ear-
ly 1800s, and took root in London where his
son Samuel created a small cigar factory. In
1886 Monte, Samuel’s heir and the family
visionary, applied the lessons of tobacco
manufacturing to catering. J. Lyons and
Company was named after a less-Yiddische
partner to put off anti-Semites. Thanks to
showmanship and an instinct for popular
taste, the operation expanded. Lyons ful-
filled the largest catering contract in his-
tory—8m meals served at the British Em-
pire Exposition of 1924-25. It owned the
biggest hotel and ice-cream plant in Eu-
rope and the largest tea-packing facility in
the world (when Lehmann was growing up,
Jews were forbidden to trade in tea, sugar
and coffee). It developed the first business
computer.
Family always came first. As did men:
the board, Mr Harding ruefully notes, nev-
er included women. They were absent, as
well, from Monte’s funeral in 1922. Custom
cautioned that wealthy women could not
“restrain their emotions”.
Mature British readers will associate
the Lyons name with tea shops and Corner
Houses (the Starbucks of their time), from
which white-aproned waitresses, known
as Nippies, made it into the Oxford English
Dictionary. The ingredients of success
were quality, value, efficiency and food
that was consistent down to the carefully
calibrated jam in Swiss rolls—Henry Ford
applied to comestibles.
Mr Harding’s affectionate family story
is deftly sandwiched in the rise and fall of
empire, two world wars, and two centuries
of social and political change. A refitted Ly-
ons factory made many of the bombs
dropped on Germany in the second world
war. Despite the chauvinism at head office,
Lyons tea shops are said to have contribut-
ed to female emancipation by providing a
safe entry to social life and consumerdom.
Previously, male-dominated pubs had
been practically the only places for many
women to order drinks.
In the end, the sticks threatened to fall
apart. A younger generation caught con-
glomeration fever and binged on acquisi-
tions, adding Baskin-Robbins, an Ameri-
can ice-cream chain, and continental
meat-processors. Overreach and spectacu-
larly bad timing—involving an oil crisis, a
recession and a sinking pound—brought
Lyons to the brink of insolvency. The hotels
were sold and then, in 1978, the company it-
self. But the denouement, a delicate busi-
ness complicated by lots of heirs, was man-
aged “with care and honour”, Mr Harding
writes, and with “friendly relationships in-
tact”. Monte’s bundle held fast. 7Catering empiresStorms in a teacup
Legacy: One Family, A Cup of Tea and the
Company that Took on the World. By
Thomas Harding. William Heinemann; 592
pages; £25