Foreword by Arthur Brown

Summary

Almost two generations of economists across the world have been familiar with the name Phillips from its attachment to the curve depicting a relation between the unemployment rate and wage inflation. A generation of economists in half a dozen universities also learned to associate that name with an hydraulic model that demonstrated with brilliant clarity the consequences of the interrelations set out in Keynesian economics. A smaller number of readers would probably be aware of a variety of articles on macroeconomic and econometric subjects under the same name. In this book, mainly through the efforts of Robert Leeson, all the published (and some hitherto unpublished) writings of Alban William Housego Phillips are assembled, along with a selection of the discussions which they provoked at the time of their publication or, in a few cases, more recently.

Any collection of a writer's works has something of the character of a memorial to him. The man to whom the present collection stands in this relation was a very remarkable person indeed, whose writings (and hydraulic model) by no means exhaust the reasons for which he should be remembered. Bill Phillips' career, not in the least an orthodox academic one, was a switchback of triumphs and disasters. Born in New Zealand in 1914, he left school without any immediate prospect of higher education and passed into a wandering life, in the course of which he qualified and worked as an engineer.