personal remembrances

Bill Phillips was a remarkable person, and in working up to the subject of the Phillips Curve, it may be useful for me to reminisce a bit about my memories of him. Our last encounter was in 1971, after he had returned to Auckland, smitten by a stroke. I was on a visit and asked if I could see Bill, when I was not fulfilling the separate purposes of my trip.

I drove to his home at an appropriate morning hour and passed him, on foot, making measured small steps, one at a time returning from his morning stroll. I waited at his doorstep and subsequently had a strained conversation in his home with the help of Mrs Phillips who acted some- what as an interpreter. It was evident that the stroke had laid low the person that I remember from England of the mid 1950s, full of exuber- ance, fresh ideas and optimism about our subject. We had good oppor- tunities then to discuss wages, inflation, unemployment and the many promising leads for econometric research, when he visited Oxford for a seminar at the Institute of Statistics.

I was able to tell him about an interesting and amusing incident concerning the hydraulic machine. Prior to my coming to Oxford, I had been at the University of Michigan, in Ann Arbor. One day, in 1952 or 1953, Abba Lerner came by to visit Kenneth Boulding. Abba told us (a group of young economists) why he was passing through – to deliver a working model of the Phillips Machine to General Motors, where Andrew Court was a chief economist.