Daily Inspiration Quote by James Meade

Meade’s line is a quiet brag disguised as gratitude, and it lands because the brag is earned. “This particular year” signals a brief, almost golden window: a moment when Cambridge economics wasn’t just a discipline but a live experiment, mid-argument, with the stakes of policy and history humming in the background. The pleasure here isn’t leisure; it’s proximity to ideas while they’re still molten.

The pairing is the point. Dennis Robertson as supervisor evokes the older Cambridge tradition: rigorous, corrective, a bit stern, an economist’s economist. “Reading essays to” suggests a tutorial culture where thinking is performed aloud, tested in real time, with someone capable of puncturing vagueness on contact. Then Meade pivots to the social-intellectual thrill of “membership of the group round Keynes.” Not “studying Keynes,” but being around him: the salon effect, the gravitational pull of a celebrity theorist whose presence reorganized conversation. “Round” is doing work: it implies orbit, hierarchy, and an inner circle.

The subtext is also institutional. Meade is documenting how economic knowledge gets made: not in solitary brilliance, but through supervision, networks, and the soft power of belonging. “Indeed an intellectual treat” carries a faint British understatement, but also a hint of amazement at the ecosystem that could produce such density of talent and influence. In a field that later sold itself as technocratic neutrality, Meade is admitting the human truth: ideas advance through scenes, not just equations.