Political economy discourses in areas such as the nature of market failure, the case for government intervention on grounds of efficiency and equity, and the interplay between economic and political forces have run for generations. This column provides an overview of the life of Nobel Prize-winning economist W Arthur Lewis, who was a critic of laissez-faire economic policies, but who also acted as a check on extreme statist interventions, arguing against heavy state subsidy to industry on purely economic grounds.