Markets are not assumed to “fail” merely because they do not meet the efficiency conditions dreamt up by mathematical economists. They are seen rather as a discovery process – a way of utilising knowledge that is distributed among millions of individual participants and that is not, even in principle, available to any central department.Markets are superior to governments for at least three fundamental reasons: they disseminate and process information more rapidly; they rely on more decision takers; and they provide, through the profit motive, an in-built incentive for agents to use this knowledge efficiently to promote ends valued by fellow citizens.Public choice theory, for its part, explains precisely why government failure is more likely than market failure. Seeing this at first hand, I have felt my own convictions about the role of the state begin to shift.Intellectually, I have been influenced by the “classical liberal” writers of the 17th and 18th centuries and by two modern schools of thought: “Austrian” economics, which has increased my confidence in markets; and US “public choice” theory, which diminished my faith in government.Austrian theory starts from far more plausible assumptions than traditional neoclassical theory. For 200 years, ordinary Americans have had a much greater distrust of government – any government – than Britons. And there seems no doubt that the US is now moving in a conservative/libertarian direction.

The question is not whether there will be less government and a devolution of powers from Washington to the states and localities, but how quickly this will occur.Yet in an important sense the US is merely returning to its pre-Great Depression traditions. The revolution that created America was an impassioned and principled rejection of government – British government. Newt Gingrich has sparked a more profound debate about the role of government than anything seen in the Eighties.It is certainly more profound than the limited debate in Europe about the future of the welfare state which is driven, it seems, purely by financial considerations. The Republican vote in the House of Representatives rose by about a third compared with the last mid-term election in 1990 – the biggest swing since the late Twenties, when the Democrats enjoyed a comparable surge in support.I see this as evidence that the conservative revolution that began with Ronald Reagan is gaining, not losing, momentum. Bill Clinton won the 1992 election only by packaging himself as a quasi-conservative committed to “ending welfare as we know it” He then shifted sharply to the left. But the reaction in last November’s congressional elections was remarkable. These years were marked by great changes in collegiate life: the early period was perturbed by much student unrest; the latter saw the admission of women into the hitherto all-male society.

He also initiated a highly successful programme of European / United States Fellowships; his services in fostering international friendships were recognised by his appointment as OBE in 1966 and as Cavaliere of the Italian Order of Merit in 1980.A change in the fund’s policy led Putt to leave Harkness House and to accept the full-time Senior Tutorship of his old college, Christ’s, in 1968; he held this office until his retirement in 1978. This was followed by a brief period as warden of a student hostel and Secretary of the Appointments Committee at Queen’s University, Belfast.However, the Second World War intervened and, in 1940, Putt found himself in the uniform of an Ordinary Seaman; he remained in the Royal Navy until, with the rank of Lieutenant-Commander, he returned to Exeter in 1946, as Warden of Crossmead Hall and Tutor for Overseas Students.Putt’s naval service had encompassed both convoy duty in a 1917-vintage destroyer (which he chronicled in his first book, Men Dressed as Seamen, 1943) and, from 1941 on, work as an officer in Naval Intelligence, stationed at Bletchley Park; he had also stood (unsuccessfully) as Liberal candidate for Torbay in the 1945 election.After three years at Exeter, Putt was appointed Warden of Harkness House, London, the British base for the Commonwealth Fund’s Fellowship programme; he became the first non-American Director of the fund’s Division of International Fellowships in 1966. However, after a year in post, Putt felt increasingly unhappy at what he termed “the flurried unrewarding anonymity” of his job; it was with relief that he resigned and, after a brief period of freelance literary reviewing, took up a one- year Lectureship in English at University College, Exeter. A voracious reader even as a schoolboy at Torquay Grammar School, Gorley Putt succeeded in gaining a Devon County Major Scholarship to Christ’s in 1930; this also marked the beginning of what, in his autobiography, Wings of a Man’s Life (1990), he called “my lifelong love affair with my college”. After graduating BA with First Class Honours in both parts of the English Tripos, he engaged in research in English drama for a year before gaining a Commonwealth Fund Fellowship in 1934.

This prestigious award, which enabled him not only to acquire, at Yale University, the first of his two MA degrees but also to travel widely throughout the United States, founded his abiding affection for America; it also initiated his connection with the fund whose employee he later became for nearly 20 years. Putt vividly recounted his experiences, and those of other Commonwealth Fund Fellows, in his View from Atlantis (1955).On his return from the US in 1936, Putt joined the BBC as a Talks Assistant, initially in London and subsequently in Bristol. But Putt’s gregarious, somewhat Pickwickian manner scarcely concealed his other great love – a burning passion for the English language and its literature, which caused him to write authoritatively on the works of Henry James (in A Reader’s Guide to Henry James, 1966, and A Preface to Henry James, 1986), to secure election as a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature in 1952 and to utter comments on contemporary linguistic fashions that were always trenchant and elegantly phrased but never malicious.
Gorley Putt (he discouraged the use of his first name Samuel) was born into a seafaring family in Brixham, the year before the outbreak of the First World War; his father, Poole Putt, was drowned in 1918 when his ship was torpedoed. For nigh on 30 years Putt’s upright, astonishingly youthful figure was usually to be seen at the centre of any festive occasion; he was the one Fellow of Christ’s College who seemed to know and befriend every undergraduate and whose “mini- combinations”, in which he dispensed wit, wisdom and good wine in his rooms late into the evening, were legendary.