Thomas Balogh, Baron Balogh

Tamás^[1] (Thomas) Balogh, Baron Balogh (2 November 1905 – 20 January 1985) was a British economist and member of the House of Lords.

The elder son of a wealthy Budapest Jewish family (his father was head of public transport, his mother the daughter of a professor), Balogh studied at the city Gymnasium, considered 'the Eton of Hungarian youth', then at the universities of Budapest and Berlin. He took a two-year research position at Harvard University as a Rockefeller Fellow in 1928. Following this, Balogh worked in banking in Paris, Berlin and Washington before coming to England.^[2]

After getting British citizenship in 1938, he became a lecturer at Balliol College, Oxford, and was elected to a Fellowship in 1945, then became Reader in 1960. He was also the economic correspondent for the New Statesman, an economic adviser to Harold Wilson's Cabinet office following the 1964 Labour Party victory,^[3] and member of the Secretariat of the League of Nations.^[2]

Balogh was created a Life Peer as Baron Balogh, "of Hampstead in Greater London" on 20 June 1968.^[4]

He was married twice: firstly in 1945 to Penelope Noel Mary Ingram Tower (daughter of Rev. Henry Bernard Tower, Vicar of Swinbrook, Oxfordshire, and widow of Oliver Gatty [1907-1940], a Balliol Fellow, by whom she had a daughter, Tirril), a psychotherapist, with whom he had two sons and a daughter; secondly in 1970 to Catherine (née Storr), a psychologist.^[5]

Major works

• The Dollar Crisis (1949)
• The Economics of Poverty (1955)
• The Irrelevance of Conventional Economics (1982)

Biographies

• The Life and Times of Thomas Balogh: A Macaw Among Mandarins, June Morris (Sussex Academic Press, 2007).^[6]

References

1. Hungarian-British Diplomacy 1938-1941: The Attempt to Maintain Relations, Andras Bán, Frank Cass Publishers, 2004, pg 180
2. A Biographical Dictionary of Dissenting Economists, ed. Philip Arestis, Malcolm C. Sawyer, pg 28-35, Edward Elgar Publishing Ltd, 2000
3. Brief Lives, Paul Johnson, pp 22-24, Arrow Books, 2011
4. The London Gazette: no. 44618. p. 6975. 21 June 1968.
5. The Life and Times of Thomas Balogh: A Macaw Among Mandarins, June Morris, Sussex Academic Press, 2007, pg 47