Q&A with Tony Aspromourgos

Emeritus Professor Tony Aspromourgos (PhD 1986) retired from fulltime employment at the University in July 2019.

How has Economics changed over the period you have been at the University?

Well of course, there has been great institutional change: from a ‘Department of Economics’, as the more or less dominant element in a ‘Faculty of Economics’; to a numerically less important Department, in a Faculty that was expanding in areas of business studies; to a mere ‘Discipline’, within a ‘School of Economics & Political Science’, in turn, within a ‘Faculty of Economics and Business’, dominated by business disciplines; to, finally, since 1/1/11, its current position as a School within a Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences.

The move of Economics to a new humanities and social sciences faculty was contentious at the time (with both staff and alumni); but there is no question that it has been an improvement in the position of Economics, from an intellectual point of view. Economics is a fundamental social science discipline, with a wide-ranging remit in terms of the issues and problems with which it must engage. It is not a mere ancillary element of business studies, although certainly important for that field.

What are your best memories of your time working at the University?

I arrived at the University at the beginning of 1982, as a PhD student of the late Peter Groenewegen. So when I retired in July last year, I had been here for more than 37 years. I became a fulltime member of the lecturing staff from the beginning of 1985. I actually first taught university students as a tutor at the University of Melbourne, from 1978 (at the unripe young age of 21), and tutored and lectured a bit while a PhD student; so from that point of view, I have been a university teacher, in one way or another, for 43 years. With respect to research, as my CV makes clear, I have been throughout my career, since my first research publications from 1985, almost entirely a solitary researcher, not a collaborator (the loneliness of the long-distance researcher, so to speak). So, when I think of best memories, they don’t involve research, since my intellectual engagements on the research front have been more with colleagues outside the University than within.

My best memories are therefore mainly of some of the fine students I had the privilege of teaching, notwithstanding that the best of them were good enough to almost teach themselves. Of course, I will not actually name any of them here, since this would unavoidably be partial and therefore somewhat arbitrary. Anyway, they know who they are.

“My best memories are therefore mainly of some of the fine students I had the privilege of teaching, notwithstanding that the best of them were good enough to almost teach themselves.”

How will you remain connected with the School of Economics as an Emeritus Professor?

The Emeritus award is just a recognition for outstanding contributions to learning, scholarship and the University, over a long period. I am continuing to teach one unit per year—currently the senior-level undergraduate ‘History of Economic Thought’ course—which has me in at the University most Fridays (before COVID-19 intervened). I think this is an intellectually important course to continue. I enjoy the teaching as well, and it assists in keeping me connected with the School and interacting with colleagues—not least, via Friday evening drinks at The Eveleigh Hotel! (I comment on ongoing research activity below.)

I’m also happy to act as something of a link between the School and the Economics alumni of the University, if that is at all useful. I have taught so many of them since the mid-1980s. In the eighties and nineties in particular, I taught either first- or second-year macroeconomics virtually every year, and in a team-teaching framework. In those days everyone in the previous Faculty did economics; so I literally taught almost everyone who went through the Faculty. But I have also taught many, many of the economics students since 2000, notably in the senior-level undergraduate ‘Monetary Economics’ and ‘History of Economic Thought’ units, and in fourth-year Honours (the latter, also for most of my years of service prior to 2000)

What other plans do you have postretirement?

In the last year or so when people have asked me what I’m going to do, or what I’m doing, in retirement my stock answer has been: I’m doing the same things I’ve been doing for years, just not getting paid to do them anymore. This is a slight overstatement: I’m not (much) teaching anymore and I can disentangle myself from (most of) the suffocating university bureaucracy and managerialism. I have research interests that I am selectively pursuing and will write and publish on—in particular, the place of nature in the human economy, from the perspective of a synthesis of the classical approach to production and distribution and the Keynesian approach to economic activity levels. Plus having a fairly distinguished CV over a long period means that one gets invited to write some things. I’ve recently completed a new entry on the ‘Invisible Hand’, commissioned for the 3rd edition of the Palgrave Dictionary of Economics. The Editors gave me up to 10,000 words; so this is a substantial essay really (although I showed enormous self-restraint and kept it to about 8,400 words!). The invisible hand is, of course, profoundly emblematic for economics and its history. One benefit of being a solitary researcher, and without need of any expensive equipment etc., is that I can continue with the intellectual work, selfcontained, more or less.

How would you like to see the School evolve in the future?

I don’t presume to advise on that. I will just say this. In the broadest terms, human society, polity and economy, all interdependent and interacting, evolve historically. Fire burns the same in Ancient Athens and contemporary Sydney; but the structure and organization of the human social economy is very different between those two—and there is no ‘end of history’. To remain relevant as a policy science, economics must evolve with the reality it seeks to understand and shape. The two great issues of our era are climate change and economic inequality (the latter interacting with social and political inequality). Naturally enough, given my intellectual interests, I think that a remembering of the intellectual history of our discipline is an important contributor to taking the discipline forward and therefore is an important element of the economics curriculum.