Bob Gregory contrasts ‘the presuppositions of Royal Parade’ of 1950 Melbourne with the present outlook of himself and Australia at large. He outlines the evolution of his methodological position from the University of Melbourne student to the Canberra policy advisor, and defends that...

The paper advances an answer to a puzzle: Why is any lending or borrowing done in terms of money, when such money debt exposes the lenders’ wealth to inflation risk? The ‘received’ answer to this question is that money bonds are just proxies for real bonds, proxies born of insufficient...

The paper advances a simple and tractable Wicksellian model of inflation, in which the price level is determined by the interaction of the nominal rate of return on capital with a rule that governs the interest rate at which the Central Bank supplies money, and in which the equality of the...

In a well-known paper Friedman and Savage (1948) advocated a utility function in which the marginal utility of wealth is increasing in wealth above some critical level of wealth. In order to win a reception for this novel conception of the utility function Friedman and Savage took some pains in...

The key problem of economics in Australia and New Zealand is its marginality. The history of its economics will, then, be at bottom an account of the confrontation of that marginality. Thus any story of economic thought in Australia and New Zealand will necessarily tell of the attempt to plant...

Australia is notably, if not notoriously, a land of much space but few people. Its population density is, correspondingly, almost the lowest of any country in the world: only Namibia and Mongolia record a lower figure. Australia’s extreme divergence from the common human experience has been a...