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
29 - Phillips and stabilisation policy as a threat to stability
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
Though we were both graduate students at the LSE, Bill Phillips arrived after I had left. Hence, I only met him after he had already joined the faculty. Even at our first meeting his delightful personality, kindliness and quick mind were all immediately evident. I can therefore say that I knew him, and that it is an enormous pleasure to be able to contribute to his Collected Works.
In chapter 16, a remarkable essay that emerged from his dissertation, Bill Phillips demonstrated that automatic stabilisation policies can exacerbate instability rather than contain it. Moreover, an adjustment of the parameters governing such a programme in the directions that common sense would suggest may well worsen the problem. The essay also offers an intuitive description of one process that can be taken to underlie the Phillips Curve. In addition, such a graph is drawn in the paper, though it is based neither on empirical data nor on any formal model. Nor does the discussion offer anything that can be used directly to meet the later monetarist challenge claiming to have demonstrated that in the long run the Phillips Curve must be vertical at ‘the natural rate of unemployment’.
Those destabilising stabilisation policies
When, in 1960, I was writing my article, ‘Pitfalls in Contracyclical Policies…’, I was not aware that a paper demonstrating my main con- clusions had already appeared in print six years earlier. The fault is only partly mine, for, with his usual modesty, Bill Phillips has eschewed melo- dramatics in describing these results.
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- A. W. H. Phillips: Collected Works in Contemporary Perspective , pp. 282 - 287Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2000