Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of contributors
- Foreword by Arthur Brown
- Preface by Robert Leeson
- Part I Bill Phillips: Some Memories and Reflections
- Part II The Phillips Machine
- Part III Dynamic Stabilisation
- 15 The optimal control articles
- 16 Stabilisation policy in a closed economy
- 17 Stabilisation policy and the time-forms of lagged responses
- 18 Arnold Tustin's The Mechanism of Economic Systems: a review
- 19 Michel Kalecki's Theory of Economic Dynamics: An Essay on Cyclical and Long-Run Changes in the Capitalist Economy: a review
- 20 The growth articles
- 21 A simple model of employment, money and prices in a growing economy
- 22 Employment, inflation and growth
- 23 Economic policy and development
- 24 The famous Phillips Curve article
- 25 The relation between unemployment and the rate of change of money wage rates in the United Kingdom, 1861-1957
- 26 Discussion of Dicks-Mireaux and Dow's The Determinants of Wage Inflation: United Kingdom, 1946-1956
- 27 The Melbourne paper
- 28 Wage changes and unemployment in Australia, 1947-1958
- 29 Phillips and stabilisation policy as a threat to stability
- 30 The Phillips Curve in macroeconomics and econometrics
- 31 Bill Phillips' contribution to dynamic stabilisation policy
- 32 A Left Keynesian view of the Phillips Curve trade-off
- 33 Interactions with a fellow research engineer-economist
- 34 Does modern econometrics replicate the Phillips Curve?
- 35 The famous Phillips Curve article: a note on its publication
- Part IV Econometrics
- References
- Index of names
- Index of subjects
33 - Interactions with a fellow research engineer-economist
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 04 May 2010
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of contributors
- Foreword by Arthur Brown
- Preface by Robert Leeson
- Part I Bill Phillips: Some Memories and Reflections
- Part II The Phillips Machine
- Part III Dynamic Stabilisation
- 15 The optimal control articles
- 16 Stabilisation policy in a closed economy
- 17 Stabilisation policy and the time-forms of lagged responses
- 18 Arnold Tustin's The Mechanism of Economic Systems: a review
- 19 Michel Kalecki's Theory of Economic Dynamics: An Essay on Cyclical and Long-Run Changes in the Capitalist Economy: a review
- 20 The growth articles
- 21 A simple model of employment, money and prices in a growing economy
- 22 Employment, inflation and growth
- 23 Economic policy and development
- 24 The famous Phillips Curve article
- 25 The relation between unemployment and the rate of change of money wage rates in the United Kingdom, 1861-1957
- 26 Discussion of Dicks-Mireaux and Dow's The Determinants of Wage Inflation: United Kingdom, 1946-1956
- 27 The Melbourne paper
- 28 Wage changes and unemployment in Australia, 1947-1958
- 29 Phillips and stabilisation policy as a threat to stability
- 30 The Phillips Curve in macroeconomics and econometrics
- 31 Bill Phillips' contribution to dynamic stabilisation policy
- 32 A Left Keynesian view of the Phillips Curve trade-off
- 33 Interactions with a fellow research engineer-economist
- 34 Does modern econometrics replicate the Phillips Curve?
- 35 The famous Phillips Curve article: a note on its publication
- Part IV Econometrics
- References
- Index of names
- Index of subjects
Summary
Although born a world apart, Phillips' and my careers had striking parallels, warm interactions, and similar motivations. We both did research on electrical engineering, automatic control, computer simulation, economic stability, econometrics, and inflation-unemployment.
Control theory
We started corresponding in the summer of 1956 about bringing the tools of operations research and electrical engineering to bear on improving economic stability. Bill had already published several articles applying tools from electrical engineering to the stability of single loop economic models.
It was becoming clear, however, that economic stabilisation policy called for the analysis of economic systems incorporating multiple loops and multiple control variables. Fortunately operations research on industrial operations done at Carnegie Mellon University by a team composed of (in alphabetic order): Holt, Franco Modigliani, John F. Muth, and Herbert A. Simon, had shown that the optimal solution to that problem could be obtained under dynamic uncertainty (Holt et al. 1960). Where the criterion in a decision analysis could be adequately approximated with a quadratic function, and the dynamic system could be approximated by linear difference equations, the inversion of an infinite matrix would yield optimal linear decision rules. That model was discovered independently three times: by our operations research group, by economist Henri Theil, and by a group of process control engineers. Later it was adopted as the ‘classic’ model for engineering control.
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- A. W. H. Phillips: Collected Works in Contemporary Perspective , pp. 308 - 314Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2000
- 3
- Cited by