Phillips, Alban William Housego (1914–1975)

Abstract

Bill Phillips was born on 18 November 1914 into a farming family in Te Rehunga, near Dannevirke, in southern Hawkes Bay in the North Island of New Zealand, and died at Auckland, New Zealand on 4 March 1975. He came to economics after a career as an electrical engineer and following military service and imprisonment by the Japanese in the Second World War; in 1946 he became a Member of the Order of the British Empire for his military services. His rise in the profession was rapid. He was appointed an Assistant Lecturer at the London School of Economics in 1950 and to a Readership in 1954. In 1958 he became Tooke Professor, resigning in 1967 to take a Chair at the Institute of Advanced Studies, Australian National University in Canberra. A crippling stroke in 1969 forced his retirement and he lived in Auckland until his death. In his short career in economics he made major contributions to problems of dynamic stabilization, estimation and, most notoriously, empirical economics, where he gave his name to the ‘Phillips curve’.