The Brendan Thompson Prize for International Economics

<>The Waikato Management School annually awards a prize in memory of Brendan Thompson to the to student in the international economics course. By coincidence I was in Hamilton for the 2009 School of Management Prize giving on 5 May, and again was asked to give the prize awarded in his memory ( 2008 speech.)

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<>Keywords: History of Ideas, Methodology & Philosophy;

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<>Thankyou for the honour of inviting me to give the Brendan Thompson prize again. I miss Brendan, who died twelve years ago, after teaching for many years at the University of Waikato in international economics and economic history.

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<>I am writing a history of New Zealand from an economic perspective. This very month I am using some of his work – a data series he constructed. But more than that, I regret that Brendan and I are not discussing the project. He would have been intrigued at my latest discovery – in effect that the New Zealand economy ‘took off’ at the end of the nineteenth century, similar to what the scholar Walt Rostow described – and the following lively discussion with Brendan would have increased my understanding of it.

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<>You know, what you get from your university education is not what you learn but what you remember twelve years later. That’s what Brendan would have wanted for his students, and for today’s students. That is why we remember scholars like Brendan, and why he would be so pleased with the prize which recognises a student who will have much international economics to remember for many years in the future.

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<>So I would like to congratulate Hayley Sutcliffe for achievement in international economics. I hope you will be as gripped by the subject as Brendan was, and will contribute over the years to our discipline in the way in which he did.