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though the decline of the fellowship and fun in academic life today. In the post-war era, indeed, right up to the seventies the ‘Lucky Jims’ of academe only had to bear the pressure of administrative and teaching load. Research was purely voluntary. It was a time, too, when the Commonwealth was actually pumping extra resources into higher education. The seventies, though, was a time when Melbourne was research-wise put in the shade by the Monash department. However the plain fact was that of the seeds that led to the intellectual ferment and outpouring at Monash originally came from Melbourne. In the previous decade many of the Melbourne staff had been pirated away to join the newly established Monash University. The book hardly discusses another act of piracy in 1991, when Monash enticed Dr. Peter Dixon, the then Director of the Institute of Applied Economic and Social Research and his team of econometric modellers to shift to the Centre of Policy Studies at Monash. Today the rules of the game are making do with less but also having their efforts monitored by teaching evaluations and the dreaded KPIs (key performance indicators). In addition, certainly at Melbourne, there is an incessant and somewhat unnerving pressure to publish in A-starred journals on usually some esoteric, indescribably boring problem. The Melbourne school of economics has been able to lift both its research productivity and overall teaching standards. Peter Lloyd, Jeff Borland, John Freebairn and Robert Dixon complete the ensemble of authors with Lloyd taking care of the eighties and Borland from the 1990s up till the present. The latter makes especial note of the fact that Melbourne did not enter into amalgamation with any other tertiary providers thereby saving itself from possible enfeeblement. In that context, the Mel-
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The bottom line…, Review by Alex Millmow
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bourne school of economics completely avoided the dissipation of energies that their counterparts at the University of Sydney endured over the struggle about introducing political economy units into the syllabus. Of course the Melbourne-Sydney rivalry about which has the best school in economics has always been a perennial point. Each can boast a glittering alumni and academic celebrities. It was interesting, too, that both departments put out their respective histories in the space of a few months (Millmow, 2010). John Freebairn, the current Ritchie Professor of Economic Research, one of the few research chairs in Australian economics looks at how the Melbourne school contributed to the furthering of national economic policy by making critical contributions in social policy and equity, trade policy, macroeconomic stabilisation, public finance and microeconomic reform. In the last chapter Robert Dixon lists some of the seminal intellectual contributions emanating from Melbourne including Hearn’s Plutology (1863) Giblin’s multiplier (1930) Brian Reddaway’s systematic interpretation of Keynes’s General Theory (1936) to Ian McDonald’s work with Robert Solow on why real wages are rigid (1981). He concludes by stating that much of the work on theory at Melbourne today that revolves around the issues of trade, labour and economic growth were also those that intrigued the likes of Copland and Giblin. Alex Millmow is a senior lecturer at the University of Ballarat, Victoria, Australia and President of the History of Economic Thought Society of Australia.
Reference Millmow, A., 2010, Economic schools and geography’s accidents’, 2010 Australian Financial Review, 5 January.
vol. 53, no. 1, 2011