Every economist knows the Phillips Curve.

It’s this fundamental relationship in the economy. This surprisingly strong connection between inflation and employment. Prices go up, there are more jobs. Rein back inflation, and more people are out work. It’s hotly debated what this all means.
 
The author of the Phillips Curve, Bill Phillips, is almost unknown in his home country. But he has a crazy story. 

Bill Phillips was a crocodile hunter in Australia. He was an Air Ministry engineer in Singapore in World War II. For three-and-a-half years he was a prisoner of war, calmly building secret radios. And that was before he even saw a supply and demand graph. 

Bill Phillips brought new insights that helped change the direction of the whole discipline of economics in the 1950s. He was one of a few pioneering academics who brought in engineering equations to answer questions like: can governments control unemployment? Why do the price of groceries keep going up? 

To understand Bill and how he changed economics, you can look through his history, right to his childhood in rural New Zealand.

1 Bill Phillips

In 1933, Joan Robinson popularised a word.

That word was monopsony. It’s when you have only a single person or business that can buy something. This theory was outlined in Joan Robinson’s 1933 book, The Economics of Imperfect Competition.

Joan was 29 years old. She had just released a book of original insights into market competition. This was her first major achievement in what would come to be a remarkable career in economics.

2 Joan Robinson, Part I

Joan Robinson was one of the most important contributors to economics in the 20th Century. 

She used theory and graphs, but she also used poetry to expound the great debates between capitalism and socialism over the 20th Century.

This is part II of a two-part series on the life of Cambridge economist Joan Robinson.

Full sources used in this episode are available at gridlinesradio.org.

3 Joan Robinson Part II

Marilyn Waring raised the alarm that women's unpaid labour is invisible in GDP.

She pointed a challenge directly to the UN, and every bureaucracy around the world that used their system. 

And her book, Counting for Nothing, inspired a new generation to add a potent dose of unadulterated feminism to economics.

4 Marilyn Waring

Grid Lines is a podcast about people who have pushed the boundaries of how we think about money, inequality, and markets. Some of these people are famous economists; most are not. Each episode is out monthly.

Grid Lines is produced and hosted by Darian Woods.

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