A few hares to chase : the life and economics of Bill Phillips

"From a remote Dannevirke farm to wartime POW camps to London's intellectual world, the Bill Phillips story is a true New Zealand tale of adventurous spirit and can-do energy"--Publisher information. The Phillips Curve is world famous amongst economists. The man who invented it was an inventor, an engineer, a genius, who led an exciting life and contributed to economics in many different ways. Born and brought up on a remote farm in rural New Zealand, his early life was a search for adventure. He invented toys and rebuilt machinery as a child. He experienced the rigours of the Great Depression on construction sites, and while still a young man he roamed the outback of Australia picking up casual work, sometimes working in gold mines, sometimes crocodile hunting. In 1937 he set off to discover militarising Japan, a guerrilla war in Manchuria, Stalin's Soviet Union, and the tensions in Europe. On the outbreak of war, he joined the RAF and was sent to Singapore where he rearmed planes but was eventually incarcerated in a POW camp by the Japanese. In camp he learned languages, invented gadgets for the troops and built a clandestine radio. If his first 30 years had been a search for adventure, his later life was a search for economic stability. Back in Britain after the war, he scraped through a sociology degree at the LSE, before convincing a sceptical faculty to let him build a hydraulic model of the economy. This beautiful complex machine was a great success and put Bill Phillips on the track of serious economics. In the next few decades he developed new ideas for stabilising economies, was one of the first to use electronic computers, developed the Phillips Curve, showed ways to help an economy to grow, and developed new techniques to model economies. Always innovative, he took another heading in his later years, working out how to stabilise the Chinese economy which was being wracked by the Cultural Revolution. Bill Phillips pioneered a dozen new directions in economics, making him one of the most innovative and influential of our economic pioneers. ‘bill Phillips Was An Inventor, An Adventurer, A Hero And A Relentlessly Original Thinker. He Was The Indiana Jones Of Economics And Alan Bollard Has Written A Definitive Biography.’ - Tim Harford, Author Of The Undercover Economist And The Undercover Economist Strikes Back How Did An Electrician From New Zealand With A Few Mediocre Grades In Sociology Write The Second Most Cited Economics Article In The World, Build The Moniac - A Revolutionary Computing Machine - And Quickly Rise To Become One Of The World’s Leading Economists? From A Remote Dannevirke Farm To Wartime Pow Camps To London’s Intellectual World, The Bill Phillips Story Is A True New Zealand Tale Of Adventurous Spirit And Can-do Energy. ?Economists know him for the Phillips Curve, for his work on stabilizing volatile economies, and for MONIAC, his extraordinary invention which was a hydraulic forerunner of computer econometric modelling. But Bill Phillip's youthful adventures shaped much of the genius he would become. Born on a remote New Zealand farm in the Great Depression; gold mining and crocodile hunting in the Australian outback; serving with the RAF; and incarcerated in a Japanese POW camp. After the War, an inauspicious start as the LSE led - in just nine years - to becoming chair of economics, where his creativity and ingenuity in striving for order and stability would become his legacy.?--Page of 4 of cover A Biography Of Famous Economist Bill Phillips. It Recounts His Childhood In Rural New Zealand, His Time With The Raf, And Later At The Lse, Where He Built A Hydraulic-driven Economics Computing Machine And Became World Famous For The Phillips Curve. Alan Bollard. Includes Bibliographical References.