Obituary: Bryan Philpott

By BRIAN FALLOW

Economist. Born in Palmerston North, 1921. Died in Wellington on July 18, aged 79.

In his later years Professor Bryan Philpott often seemed to be the voice of an earlier, more decent time. Doyen of New Zealand's academic economists, he preferred the pragmatic to the dogmatic and was a trenchant critic of the economic policy direction of the past 15 years.

He was of the generation formed and tempered by the Great Depression and the Second World War, which he spent in the Royal New Zealand Navy, serving in motor torpedo boats.

After a stint as a woolbroker he studied first at Victoria University of Wellington and then at Leeds.

He worked for the Meat and Wools Boards' economic service in the mid-1950s before becoming the foundation professor of agricultural economics at Lincoln College in 1958. He returned to Victoria in 1971 to take up the Macarthy chair in economics, a post he held until retiring in 1986.

It was an active retirement. Philpott, with his accompanying dog and pipe smoke (though both strictly against the rules), remained a fixture at Vic. His former students remember him fondly as a good teacher, lucid, supportive and able to engage students at any level.

"We threw a surprise party for him a couple of years ago," recalls Infometrics director Dr Gareth Morgan, "and guys came from Australia and further afield. He was one of our best."

Philpott was a pioneer in New Zealand in the field of constructing quantitative models of the economy as an aid to making policy.

He was a co-founder of the economist forecasting consultancy Business and Economic Research Ltd (Berl) in 1958. Forecasting Arnold Nordmeyer's Black Budget was an early success, and he remained convener of Berl's forecasting panel until this year.

For fellow economist Len Bayliss, Philpott's hallmark was his integrity, both personal and professional. "He was straightforward without being shallow. He would state a case unequivocally. If he had doubts he would say so, but it didn't stop him from being forthright."

It is as a vigorous opponent of some of the central tenets of the prevailing economic policy of the past 15 years that Philpott is most widely known.

Typically, behind the rhetoric he directed at the "ayatollahs" of the Business Roundtable and their policymaking handmaidens lay meticulously compiled numerical evidence.

In the somewhat wistful conclusion of his contribution to The New Politics: a Third Way for New Zealand, published late last year, Philpott said his modelling 10 years ago had predicted the slow growth and burgeoning overseas debt which have since occurred.

Whether his more old-fashioned Keynesian prescription would have served us better we will, alas, never know.

Philpott is survived by his wife, Margaret, two children and three grandchildren.