While America laboured through the Depression, Ben Spock laboured through medical school, married, read Freud, added psychiatry to specialisation in paediatrics – an unheard-of combination – and underwent a personal psychoanalysis.By the time Dr Spock set up his Manhattan paediatric practice in the Thirties, he had decided that children were people and determined to treat them as such. The same barriers that kept everyone in an ascribed place also ensured a place for each, producing what Spock once described as “a paradox of authoritarian security”. Sixty years later he could still remember his amazement when his 6ft 4in frame gave him success as a Yale oarsman and took him to the 1924 Olympics and the beginnings of self-esteem.It was a summer job in a camp for handicapped children that turned Spock towards medicine and it was his own childhood experiences combined with theirs that ensured that the conventional symptom-based medicine of the time would not satisfy him. His family fitted into a neighbourhood and society crisscrossed with rigid barriers of race, sex and religion; wealth, status and generation. So what was Benjamin Spock? If we separate Spock the man, Spock the paediatrician and Spock the politician, we lose sight of a whole that was infinitely greater than the sum of those parts.
His lifetime spanned every decade of this century. Born in 1903, the young Ben had a strict and mildly eccentric “bluestocking” mother and a stern, distant father who was full of rectitude and empty of joy. Shy, lanky and much-teased, Spock grew up God- and father-fearing and full of inner uncertainties.

The one-size-fits-all monetary policy puts an additional burden on fiscal policy just at the time when it appears to have become much less effective.. TO MILLIONS of parents all over the world, Benjamin Spock was the great baby-guru: the man who wrote The Common Sense Book of Baby and Child Care. To millions of Americans, he was the peacenik of the Sixties; the man who incited decent American youth to burn draft cards rather than fight in Vietnam and almost went to gaol for it. To millions of women he was an enemy, advocating liberation for children at the expense of their mothers; and for a period he was a dangerous radical, butt of men like Spiro Agnew who called all hippies “the work of Spock”, and Mayor Daley who blamed the ills of Chicago on his “corrupting influence”.

We ran an enormous fiscal deficit in the early 1990s but the recovery did not come till they cut interest rates and let the currency go. Expect over the next four or five years the fringes of Europe to boom and the core to decline, an interesting reversal of the trends for most of the European Union’s history.But there are limits to self-adjustment, particularly within Europe where cross-border migration is still quite limited. Much of the burden will in practice fall on fiscal policy – or so it is fashionable among economists to claim.I have a problem here I’m not sure that fiscal policy works very well any more. Governments raise taxes, as they have done here, but we bound on regardless.

Governments cut taxes but instead of spending the money voters save it, as in Japan. Members of the euro club will find that sometimes monetary policy will be too tight; sometimes too loose. And there will be nothing they can do about it.The result will be that other policies will have to carry much more of the burden. To some extent economies are self-adjusting: people move to better job opportunities; those who are left gradually accept lower wages; costs in booming areas rise and start to choke off the excess demand. The problem, I suppose is that if someone else runs it (ie the European Central Bank in Frankfurt) you are guaranteed to have the wrong policy at various times. With hindsight it was pretty stoopid to have lower rates in the late 1980s boom than in the early 1990s recession but there you are.It is also true that you can have wrong rates for different parts of the country and even for different parts of the economy.

We probably have too low rates for parts of the services sector, which is booming, and too high for manufacturing, where output is currently falling.So even if you do run your own monetary policy you have no guarantee you will get it right. At the moment we have interest rates that are more-or-less appropriate for the South of England but are too high for the North. We know that countries are going to have the wrong interest rates. In what ways will this matter?I suppose the starting point would be to say that we have had situations when countries have had the wrong rates in the past, either because governments (which used to fix short-term interest rates in those not-at-all-distant days when they told central banks what to do) made mistakes.Here in Britain we had too low rates in 1986 and 1987 (see bottom graph) when we were shadowing the mark; then too high in 1990-91 when sterling was part of the ERM. The rise in the Irish exchange rate that the markets have imposed and which has now been validated has therefore been equivalent to a 0.75 rise in interest rates – not enough, but a move in the right direction.But this is the second last time that it is going to be possible to make this sort of adjustment. Slightly over-simplifying, the fringe will have rates that are too loose and the core will have rates that are too tight.Think about it.