Mastodawn

How a mind-boggling device changed economic history

At the London School of Economics, a few weeks before Christmas, in 1949, the Lionel Robbins seminar was about to begin. The prestigious event was at the razor’s edge of postwar economic thought: Robbins, a giant of economics, had made the LSE a rival to John Maynard Keynes’s Cambridge, recruiting future Nobel laureates such as Friedri