Though we were both graduate students at the LSE, Bill Phillips arrived after I had left. Hence, I only met him after he had already joined the faculty. Even at our first meeting his delightful personality, kindliness and quick mind were all immediately evident. I can therefore say that I knew him, and that it is an enormous pleasure to be able to contribute to his Collected Works.

In chapter 16, a remarkable essay that emerged from his dissertation, Bill Phillips demonstrated that automatic stabilisation policies can exacerbate instability rather than contain it. Moreover, an adjustment of the parameters governing such a programme in the directions that common sense would suggest may well worsen the problem. The essay also offers an intuitive description of one process that can be taken to underlie the Phillips Curve. In addition, such a graph is drawn in the paper, though it is based neither on empirical data nor on any formal model. Nor does the discussion offer anything that can be used directly to meet the later monetarist challenge claiming to have demonstrated that in the long run the Phillips Curve must be vertical at ‘the natural rate of unemployment’.

Those destabilising stabilisation policies

When, in 1960, I was writing my article, ‘Pitfalls in Contracyclical Policies…’, I was not aware that a paper demonstrating my main con- clusions had already appeared in print six years earlier. The fault is only partly mine, for, with his usual modesty, Bill Phillips has eschewed melo- dramatics in describing these results.