Category Archives: History of Ideas, Methodology, Philosophy

All the Keynes Men

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Listener: 23 May, 1981.

Keywords: History of Ideas, Methodology & Philosophy;Macroeconomics & Money;

I once asked Dr W.B. Sutch how much Keynes had influenced the thinking of the first Labour Government. John Maynard Keynes’s book The General Theory of Employment and Money has been the most influential piece or economics writing this century in terms or its impact on both economic theory and economic policy. It explained how a government could practice deficit financing to increase employment.

Sutch, who was a government adviser in the 1930s, replied that Keynes had little influence. Rather, the government observed that housing materials were not being used, house builders were unemployed, and families desired houses, so that the Government ensured there was the finance to bring the builders and materials together to construct the houses that were needed.

Free to Choose by Milton and Rose Friedman (review)

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Listener 23 May 1981.

Keywords: History of Ideas, Methodology & Philosophy;

This book may well become a bible for advocates or the political right in New Zealand. Expressions from it (or from the television series on which it is based) are already gaining currency here. Yet such a fate would. be unfair to the Friedmans, and to New Zealand.

Riches Without Wealth

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Listener 24 November, 1979, republished in The Listener Bedside Book, No 3 (1999) p.182-183.

Keywords: History of Ideas, Methodology & Philosophy; Maori;

Raymond Firth’s study of the pre-European Maori economy, The Economics of the New Zealand Maori, is half a century old. In 1929 Firth, a young New Zealand economics graduate, decided to pursue economic anthropology, and undertook a doctorate, supervised by Bronislaw Malinkowski, at the University of London. Today, at 80, Firth is one of the grand old men of anthropology , with honorary doctorates from seven prestigious universities.

A. W. H. Phillips: 1914-1975

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Listener 18 November, 1978.

Keywords: History of Ideas, Methodology & Philosophy;

Bill Phillips was born near Dannevirke, 64 years ago this week. The beginnings of New Zealand’s most distinguished economic theorist were academically inauspicious, if picaresque, He left school at 15, became an apprentice engineer for the Public Works Department. and in the following 14 years had a variety of jobs (including crocodile hunting) in New Zealand, Australia and Britain, where he qualified as an engineer.