Warner Max Corden, “Australia’s greatest living economist,” as stated by Martin Wolf, the chief economics commentator of the Financial Times, in his foreword, has written an insightful autobiography that intersects his private life with the public realms. The book is divided into two parts, “The Early Years” and “Being an Academic Economist,” and contains an appendix with sixteen family photos.

Part I covers Corden’s early life from childhood in Germany, where he was born as Werner Max Cohn on 13 August 1927 in Breslau (today’s Wroclaw in Poland), the capital of the province of Silesia, into a Jewish merchant family, via his emigration from Nazi Germany to England in April 1938 and the further immigration of the family to Australia in December 1938 after his father’s release from Buchenwald concentration camp. The author reflects on the implications of this passage, enforced by the political circumstances, on his self-identity, emphasizing time and again and convincingly that he and his elder brother, Gerald (Gerhart), became anglophile and “a real Australian through multiculturalism.” Despite economic pressure Corden enjoyed happy school days in Victoria, where he graduated from Melbourne High School in 1945.

A regression line of Corden´s Autobiography is that “[i]f Germany was my first country and Australia my second country, England became my third, and perhaps most important, country” (p. 76). Part II begins with how, as an academic economist, Corden was decisively formed in the years he lived in London from 1953 to 1958 and in Oxford from 1967 to 1976. He came with a scholarship from the British Council to the London School of Economics, where James Meade (1907–1995), “the essence of an English gentleman” (p. 99), became his main mentor and towering influence on Corden´s later work in international economics.

Harry Johnson (1923–1977), who had already been the second examiner of Corden´s 1956 PhD thesis on population increase and foreign trade at the LSE, was decisive for Corden´s appointment as Nuffield Reader in International Economics in Oxford, where Corden succeeded Roy Harrod. The Oxford period, which Corden calls the “very best years” (ch. 13, pp. 139–159), were scientifically his most productive period in which important works such as The Theory of Protection (1971), Trade Policy and Economic Welfare (1974), and Inflation, Exchange Rates and the World Economy (1977; all Clarendon Press, Oxford) were published. Corden still is very thankful for all the stimulus he received from Harry Johnson, who “has been a major figure in my life” (p. 170) and whose contributions to international trade theory he later appreciated in a major article (Corden Reference Corden1984).

The Oxford period was also one of three substantial teaching episodes in Corden´s academic life, as were the time at the University of Melbourne (1958 to 1961) before and at the School of Advanced International Studies (SAIS) of the Johns Hopkins University in Washington, DC, thereafter (1989 to 2002). Corden´s comparative advantages as a superb teacher, whose publications also stand out for the clarity of exposition, are well known (and constantly pointed out by the author).

Leaving Oxford mainly for family reasons (and the weather), Warner Max Corden and his wife, Dorothy, moved back to Australia where he became head of the Department of Economics of the Research School of Pacific and Asian Studies of Australian National University (ANU) at Canberra, where he had already enjoyed an “extremely fruitful” (p. 134) period from 1962 to 1967. As an internationally renowned scholar, Corden now became president of the Economic Society of Australia in 1978 and an influential policy adviser well known for his many writings on tariff rates and effective protection.

Corden now enjoyed traveling as an international economist. He spent several months at the Institute for International Economic Studies in Stockholm in 1982 and at the European University Institute in Florence in 1983, held the Australian Studies Chair at Harvard for a semester in 1986, became a member of the Group of Thirty from 1983 to 1990, and worked at the International Monetary Fund from October 1986 to December 1988. Naturally, he met well-known economists, of whom many became friends, such as Peter Kenen, Bob Solow, Henryk Kierzkowski (who edited the Festschrift for Corden in 1987), his Oxford colleagues Peter Oppenheimer and Vijay Joshi, and many former students who made an academic career, such as, for example, Peter Neary or Nicholas Stern.

In Australia the young Corden was influenced by Douglas Copland (1894–1971), who was instrumental in the establishment of the Australian economics profession, including the foundation of the Economic Society of Australia and New Zealand in 1925 and their journal The Economic Record, of which he became managing editor for the first two decades. Later, almost all important Australian economists became colleagues and/or friends, such as Trevor Swan, Wilfred Salter, and John Crawford, the founder of the Research School of Pacific and Asian Studies at ANU, or Geoff Harcourt. Colleagues at ANU were also Heinz Wolfgang Arndt (1915–2002) and Fred Gruen (1921–1997). Gruen, who was born in Vienna and came with many other Austrian and German refugees on the overcrowded Dunera to Australia in 1940, was Corden´s “closest friend and intellectual and conversational soulmate” (p. 176) in the second ANU period.Footnote ¹

It took some time for Corden to discover that Arndt, who was twelve years older, “was also a Breslau boy” (p. 174). With about 24,000 out of 600,000 inhabitants, Breslau had the third-largest and respected Jewish community in Germany after Berlin and Frankfurt before the Nazi period. It was also a commercial and intellectual center with an important university. No wonder that the dismissal of academics from German universities for racial and/or political reasons under the Restoration of Civil Service Act, promulgated by the National Socialists on 7 April 1933, affected the universities in Berlin, Frankfurt, and Breslau in particular. Among the professors who were dismissed was also Arndt´s father, Fritz, a leading chemist who emigrated with his family via Oxford to Turkey, where he became head of the Institute for Chemistry at Istanbul University in 1934. The son Heinz remained in England, from where he moved to Australia in 1946.Footnote ² Corden is emphasizing the fact that he shares the characteristics of a German Jew: significantly influenced by the Enlightenment, growing up in a religious-cultural tradition in which learning is considered the highest value, well organized, and specialized in assimilation, which contributed to his later success in Australia, where in 2001 he was awarded Companion of the Order of Australia. In the case of Arndt and Corden, Germany´s loss was Australia´s gain, as also indicated by the fact that in 2007 the ANU department was renamed into the Arndt-Corden Department of Economics.

“Silesian Jews tended to be Prussian super-patriots,” Fritz Stern (Reference Stern1999, p. 70), the famous historian who himself was born in Breslau one year before Corden, wrote in the most important essay “Together and Apart: Fritz Haber and Albert Einstein” of his outstanding collection Einstein´s German World. The best example is Stern´s own godfather, Haber, the inventor of the process for the fixation of nitrogen from the air, who became director of the Kaiser-Wilhelm Institute (today´s Max Planck Institute) in Berlin in 1911 and Nobel prizewinner in Chemistry in 1919 but was also the chief architect of the German gas war in WW I, and who in the fall of 1933 found a temporary refuge in England and died of a heart attack shortly afterwards.

Fritz Stern is among the fourteen witnesses in the moving documentary film We Are Jews from Breslau by Karin Kaper and Dirk Szuszies (Reference Kaper, Szuszies and Karin2016), in which Jewish children from Breslau who survived the Holocaust explain to a mixed group of German and Polish juveniles in Wroclaw how the Nazis’ coming to power affected their life.

Other well-known èmigrè economists from Breslau were Rudolf Meidner (1914–2005), who became the co-author of the Rehn-Meidner model after WW II and the chief architect of workers´ investment funds in Sweden, and the monetary economist Hans Neisser (1895–1975), who was appreciated by John Maynard Keynes and Friedrich Hayek alike and emigrated to the US in 1933.Footnote ³ As a member of the city council, Neisser´s father, Gustav, had organized the provision of Breslau with coal during the Great War, whereas his uncle Albert had been a great dermatologist who discovered the gonorrhea bacillus.

Warner Max Corden has given his autobiography the title Lucky Boy in the Lucky Country, which he summarizes in the final chapter. Not everyone in the Cohn family was as lucky. Among those who were murdered in the Holocaust was Uncle Willy, who got his own chapter 3. Willy Cohn, an intellectual with a PhD in history, a fierce patriot who loved Germany, an active social democrat and conservative Jew who opposed “mixed marriages” and disapproved of assimilation and the renaming of Jewish family´s names (such as from Cohn to Corden), had written his memories on Breslau Jewry before its downfall. The memoir, Blown-up Traces (Cohn Reference Cohn and Conrads1995), covers the period until the Nazis´ rise to power, whereas his Breslau Diaries 1933–1941 (Cohn [Reference Cohn and Conrads2007] 2012) are an outstanding document showing the growing horror of everyday life and how the formerly vibrant Jewish community was increasingly marginalized and finally destroyed during the Nazi period.

Willy Cohn´s nephew Warner Max was luckier and became Australia´s leading economist. As such, he is rather a fox than a hedgehog, which comes out when he makes explicit that “I did not want to spend my whole life on one branch of economics … my inclination [was] to choose my research topics with the aim of sorting out current real-world issues” (p. 152). Methodologically, he favors a “horses for courses approach,” i.e., “[o]ne´s choice of models must depend on circumstances” (p. 166). Many of Corden´s insights are very timely, as is his work on protectionism. For him, this disease is back with the election of Donald Trump to president of the USA. Corden points out that “the complaints about the adverse effects of globalization reflect a failure for the social welfare system in some countries, notably in the USA, to adequately compensate the losers from international trade or indeed from other adverse shocks, such as those created by technological developments” (p. 126). In this, he shows that a political economist in his early nineties has a lot to say on the reasons for the renaissance of protectionism and what could be done against the specter of right-wing populism, which has come center stage again in so many countries in the Western world. This inspiring intellectual journey of a young Breslau boy who became one of Australia´s leading economists is highly recommended reading, not only for an older peer group who know many of the economists mentioned in Corden´s autobiography but also for a new generation interested in the interaction of economic, political, and historical events .