Political and Economic Planning (PEP) was a British policy think tank, formed in 1931 in response to Max Nicholson's article A National Plan for Britain published in February of that year in Gerald Barry's magazine The Week-End Review.
The original members included Nicholson and Barry, the zoologist Julian Huxley, the agronomist Leonard Elmhirst, the financier Sir Basil Blackett, the civil servants Dennis Routh and Sir Henry Bunbury, the research chemist Michael Zvegintzov, and Israel Sieff, a director of Marks & Spencer. Sieff was Chairman in the 1930s, followed by Elmhirst in 1939 and by Nicholson in 1953. It was a non-governmental planning organisation financed by corporations.
This prolific organisation was influential in the formation of the National Health Service, World War II and post-war planning, and the development of the African colonies. After the war it shared the offices of The Nature Conservancy in Belgrave Square, London, producing reports such as Opportunities in Industry (1957) and Advisory Committees in British Government (1960)
In 1978 PEP merged with the Centre for the Study of Social Policy (CSSP), and became the Policy Studies Institute (PSI).
Famous quotes containing the words political, economic and/or planning:
“Both the Moral Majority, who are recycling medieval language to explain AIDS, and those ultra-leftists who attribute AIDS to some sort of conspiracy, have a clearly political analysis of the epidemic. But even if one attributes its cause to a microorganism rather than the wrath of God, or the workings of the CIA, it is clear that the way in which AIDS has been perceived, conceptualized, imagined, researched and financed makes this the most political of diseases.”
—Dennis Altman (b. 1943)
“The bourgeois takes economic power very seriously, and often worships it quite unselfishly.”
—Nicolai A. Berdyaev (1874–1948)
“Sensuality takes planning and work.”
—Mason Cooley (b. 1927)