Samuel Brittan


Samuel Brittan is a columnist at the Financial Times. His most recent books are Capitalism with A Human Face (Edward Elgar—1995, Fontana—1996) and Essays, Moral, Political and Economic (Edinburgh University Press, 1998). He is an Honorary Fellow of Jesus College, Cambridge; a Hon. Doctor of Letters (Heriot–Watt University, Edinburgh); and a Hon. Doctor of the University of Essex. He has been Visiting Professor at the Chicago Law School, a Visiting Fellow of Nuffield College, Oxford and an Honorary Professor of Politics at the University of Warwick. He has been awarded the George Orwell, Senior Harold Wincott, and Ludwig Erhard prizes. He was a member of the Peacock Committee on the Finance of the BBC (1985–86). He was knighted in 1993 for “services to economic journalism” and also became that year a Chevalier de la Legion d’Honneur.




Papers Published in World Economics:


Weapons Exports

The commonly held view that an ethical approach to arms sales is desirable but ‘unaffordable’ because jobs and exports are at stake is challenged by Samuel Brittan. He argues that it arises from a failure to understand the circular flow of income, the fallacy of a ‘lump of labour’ and a long discredited mercantilist view of trade. The author contends that on moral and economic grounds, arms sales should not be subsidised or officially promoted in any way, and governments should be much stricter in enforcing bans on sales to dubious regimes.

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