Lord Beveridge was so highly influenced by the Fabian Socialists - in particular by Beatrice Potter Webb, with whom he worked on the 1909 Poor Laws report - that he could readily be counted among them. However, he was perhaps the best economist among them - his early work on unemployment (1909) and his massive historical study of prices and wages (1939) being clear testaments of his scholarship. The Fabians made him a director of the London School of Economics in 1919, as post which retained until 1937. His continual jousts with Cannan and Robbins, who were trying to wrench the LSE away from its Fabian roots, are now legendary.
After his departure from the LSE, he worked on a particularly famous wartime study which came out in 1942 and has since become known as the "Beveridge Report". In short, the Beveridge Report outlined the construction of the modern welfare state - the culmination of the Fabians' project. Once Labour took power in 1945, it set out to legislate it into existence - taking the Beveridge Report as a blueprint. One of its most remarkable assets was the convincing manner of Beveridge's argument which made it so widely acceptable: Beveridge appealed to conservatives and other doubters by arguing that the welfare institutions he proposed would increase the competitiveness of British industry in the post-war period by not only by shifting labor costs like health care and pensions out of corporate ledgers and onto the public account but also by producing healthier, wealthier and thus more motivated and productive workers who would also serve as a great source of demand for British goods.
Major Works of William H. Beveridge
Resources on William Beveridge
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