Pop Up Economics/ Tim Harford

Tim Harford's new Radio 4 series Pop-Up Economics tells stories about fascinating people and ideas in Among the stories he tells are those of Al Roth, who created a clearing-house for kidneys, the cold war game theorist Thomas Schelling and Bill Phillips, who he argues was the 'Indiana Jones of economics'.
Phillips worked as a busker, a gold miner and a crocodile hunter before studying at the London School of Economics where he used a system of water pumps and valves to create the first working model of the British economy or indeed of any economy.
Pop-Up Economics is broadcast on BBC Radio 4 on Wednesdays at 8.45pm from 16th Jan to 13th Feb. You can listen again online by downloading the podcast.



The following is some background info on Harford. He is essentially a populariser on "Economics," and ofcourse, does not offer anything really new, and important as far as economics per se goes. Wikipedia entry may be of interest all the same. RS

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Tim Harford

Born	1973
Alma mater	Brasenose College, Oxford[1]
Awards	Royal Statistical Society Excellence in Journalism, Bastiat Prize

Tim Harford (born 1973) is a English economist and journalist, residing in London.^[2] He is the author of four economics books and writes his long-running FT column, "The Undercover Economist", which is syndicated in Slate magazine, revealing the economic ideas behind everyday experiences. His new column, "Since You Asked," offers a sceptical look at the news of the week.
Harford studied at Aylesbury Grammar School and then at Brasenose College, Oxford, gaining a BA in Philosophy, Politics and Economics^[1] and then an MPhil in Economics in 1998. He joined the Financial Times in 2003 on a fellowship in commemoration of the business columnist Peter Martin. He continued to write his column after joining the International Finance Corporation in 2004, and re-joined the Financial Times as economics leader writer in April 2006. He is also a member of the newspaper's editorial board.
In October 2007, Harford replaced Andrew Dilnot on the BBC Radio 4 series More or Less. He is a visiting fellow at Nuffield College, Oxford.

Contents  [hide]  1 Awards 2 Publications 3 References 4 External links

[edit] Awards

• More or Less won the Royal Statistical Society's 2010 award for statistical excellence in broadcast journalism^[3]
• More or Less won Mensa's award for promoting intelligence in public life^[4]
• Harford was awarded the Bastiat Prize for economic journalism in 2007 (shared with Jamie Whyte)^[5] In 2010 he again drew with Whyte, in second place.

[edit] Publications

• The Market for Aid (2005) with Michael Klein, ISBN 978-0-8213-6229-7
• The Undercover Economist (2005), ISBN 978-0-345-49401-6
• The Logic of Life (2008), ISBN 978-0-8129-7787-5
• Dear Undercover Economist: Priceless Advice on Money, Work, Sex, Kids, and Life's Other Challenges. New York, Random House. 2009. ISBN 978-0-8129-8010-3
• Adapt: Why Success Always Starts with Failure. New York, Farrar, Straus and Giroux. 2011. ISBN 978-0-374-10096-4

[edit] References

1. ^ ^{a b} "Passed/Failed: An education in the life of Tim Harford, writer and economist". http://www.independent.co.uk/news/people/profiles/passedfailed-an-education-in-the-life-of-tim-harford-writer-and-economist-410282.html.
2. ^ Harford, Tim. "The random side of riots". http://timharford.com/2012/08/the-random-side-of-riots/?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+TimHarford+%28Tim+Harford%29. Retrieved 4 August 2012.
3. ^ Royal Statistical Society awards Accessed June 5, 2010
4. ^ More or Less Honoured Accessed June 5, 2010
5. ^ Fifth Annual Bastiat Prize awarded jointly to Tim Harford and Jamie Whyte Accessed June 5, 2010

[edit] External links

• Tim Harford's personal webpage with RSS Feed
• Harford's column at the Financial Times with RSS Feed
• He was a founder of PSD Blog - The World Bank Group's Private Sector Development Blog
• All is fair in love and war and poker - details of the first episode of "Trust me, I'm an economist" (BBC)
• More or Less BBC website
• Columns at Slate
• Blog at the FT, which began October 2007
• Video (and audio) of interview of Tim Harford by Will Wilkinson on Bloggingheads.tv
• TED TALKS Tim Harford: Trial, error and the God complex
• An interview with Tim Harford about The Logic of Life on The Marketplace of Ideas
• An interview with Tim Harford about Adapt on The Marketplace of Ideas

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William Phillips

 

 

 

 

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William Phillips

Neo-Keynesian economics
Phillips with his MONIAC computer
Born	(1914-11-18)18 November 1914 Te Rehunga near Dannevirke
Died	4 March 1975(1975-03-04) (aged 60) Auckland
Nationality	New Zealand
Institution	Australian National University University of Auckland
Field	Macroeconomics
Alma mater	London School of Economics
Influences	Irving Fisher John Maynard Keynes
Influenced	Paul Samuelson Robert Solow Edmund Phelps
Contributions	Phillips curve

Alban William Housego "A. W." "Bill" Phillips, MBE (18 November 1914 – 4 March 1975)^[1] was an influential New Zealand economist who spent most of his academic career at the London School of Economics (LSE). His best-known contribution to economics is the Phillips curve, which he first described in 1958. He also designed and built the MONIAC hydraulic economics computer in 1949.

Contents  [hide]  1 Early life 2 Economics career 3 References 4 External links

[edit] Early life

Phillips was born at Te Rehunga near Dannevirke, New Zealand, to Harold Housego Phillips, a dairy farmer, and his wife, Edith Webber, a schoolteacher and postmistress.^[1]
He left New Zealand before finishing school to work in Australia at a variety of jobs, including crocodile hunter and cinema manager. In 1937 Phillips headed to China, but had to escape to Russia when Japan invaded China. He traveled across Russia on the Trans-Siberian Railway and made his way to Britain in 1938, where he studied electrical engineering. At the outbreak of World War II, Phillips joined the Royal Air Force and was sent to Singapore. When Singapore fell, he escaped on the troopship Empire State, which came under attack before safely arriving in Java.
When Java, too, was overrun Phillips was captured by the Japanese, and spent three and a half years interned in a prisoner of war camp in Indonesia.^[2] During this period he learned Chinese from other prisoners, repaired and miniaturised a secret radio, and fashioned a secret water boiler for tea which he hooked into the camp lighting system.^[2] In 1946, he was made a Member of the Order of the British Empire (MBE) for his war service.
After the war he moved to London and began studying sociology at the London School of Economics, because of his fascination with prisoners of war's ability to organize themselves. But he became bored with sociology and interested in Keynesian theory, so he switched his course to economics and within eleven years was a professor of economics.

[edit] Economics career

William Phillips, LSE formal portrait.

While a student at the LSE Phillips used his training as an engineer to develop MONIAC, an analogue computer which used hydraulics to model the workings of the British economy, inspiring the term Hydraulic Macroeconomics. It was very well received and Phillips was soon offered a teaching position at the LSE. He advanced from assistant lecturer in 1951 to professor in 1958.
His work focused on British data and observed that in years when the unemployment rate was high, wages tended to be stable, or possibly fall. Conversely, when unemployment was low, wages rose rapidly. This sort of pattern had been noticed earlier by Irving Fisher, but in 1958 Phillips published his own work on the relationship between inflation and unemployment, illustrated by the Phillips curve. Soon after the publication of Phillips' paper, the idea that there was a trade-off between a strong economy and low inflation caught the imagination of academic economists and policy-makers alike. Paul Samuelson and Robert Solow wrote an influential article describing the possibilities suggested by the Phillips curve in the context of the United States. What people think of as the Phillips curve has changed substantially over time, but remains an important feature of macroeconomic analysis of economic fluctuations. Had he lived longer, Phillips' contributions may have been worthy of a Nobel Prize in economics. He made several other notable contributions to economics, particularly relating to stabilization policy.
He returned to Australia in 1967 for a position at Australian National University which allowed him to devote half his time to Chinese studies. In 1969 the effects of his war deprivations and smoking caught up with him. He had a stroke, prompting an early retirement and return to Auckland, New Zealand, where he taught at the University of Auckland. He died in Auckland on 4 March 1975.

[edit] References

1. ^ ^{a b} Nicholas Barr, "Phillips, Alban William Housego (1914–1975)" (subscription required), Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, Oxford University Press, 2004. Accessed 4 July 2008.
2. ^ ^{a b} Phillips, Alban William Housego; Robert Leeson (2000). A.W.H. Phillips: Collected Works in Contemporary Perspective. Cambridge University Press. ISBN 978-0-521-57135-7.

• Mike Hally, Electronic Brains: Stories from the Dawn of the Computer Age, Joseph Henry Press, 2005, ISBN 0-309-09630-8
• David Laidler, "Phillips in Retrospect". (A review essay on A. W. H. Phillips: Collected Works in Contemporary Perspective, edited by Robert Leeson, Cambridge, U.K., Cambridge University Press, 2000.)

[edit] External links

• Catalogue of the Phillips papers at the Archives Division of the London School of Economics
• Works by or about A. W. H. (Alban William Housego) Phillips 1914-1975 in libraries (WorldCat catalog)

[hide] v t e Keynesians Founder John Maynard Keynes Neo-Keynesians Alvin Hansen John Hicks James Meade Roy Harrod William Phillips Trygve Haavelmo Paul Samuelson James Tobin Franco Modigliani James Duesenberry William Baumol Don Patinkin Lloyd Metzler Robert Eisner Arthur Melvin Okun Robert Mundell Lawrence Klein William Poole Post-Keynesians Paul Davidson Joan Robinson Richard Kahn Michał Kalecki Abba P. Lerner Nicholas Kaldor Evsey Domar Hyman Minsky Jan Kregel Sidney Weintraub Geoff Harcourt Victoria Chick G. L. S. Shackle Anthony Thirlwall Steve Keen Marc Lavoie Myron J. Gordon Basil Moore New Keynesians Edmund Phelps George Akerlof Stanley Fischer Olivier Blanchard Alan Blinder John B. Taylor Robert J. Gordon Joseph Stiglitz Robert Shiller Stephany Griffith-Jones Mark Gertler Maurice Obstfeld Paul Krugman Kenneth Rogoff Ben Bernanke Lawrence Summers Julio Rotemberg Michael Woodford Nobuhiro Kiyotaki David Romer Greg Mankiw Nouriel Roubini Andrei Shleifer Jordi Galí Marc Melitz

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