The Vice-President of the Academy of the Social Sciences in Australia will present the eighth Colin Clark Memorial Lecture at the University of Queensland next month.
Ian Castles will discuss: Measuring Economic Progress: From Political Arithmetick to Social Accounts at the lecture on Friday, June 5 in the University's Staff and Graduates Club at 1pm.
Mr Castles said that economist Sir William Petty applied the term 'political arithmetick' to techniques of quantitative observation he used to develop the first estimates of a country's national income in the late 17th century.
'The lecture will be a commentary on Colin Clark's view, expressed in the Preface to the first edition of The Conditions of Economic Progress (1940), that ?... economics was started on the right lines by Gregory King and Sir William Petty ... We need to return to the tradition of these two brilliant pioneers from whom even now we have much to learn'.'
Mr Castles is the author of numerous lectures and papers on statistics, economic policies, public sector management and the history of economic thought.
In 1981 he was elected a Fellow of the Australian Institute of Management, in 1989 a Fellow of the Academy of Social Sciences of Australia, in 1994 he was elected a Member of the International Statistical Institute and recently was elected Vice-President of the Academy of the Social Sciences in Australia.
The Colin Clark Memorial Lecture honours English-born applied economist Colin Clark (1905-1989) who held posts at the Universities of Cambridge, Melbourne, Chicago, Oxford and Queensland. He worked as an economic advisor to the Queensland Government from 1937-1952 before serving as an honorary research consultant in the University of Queensland's Economics Department.
He was a pioneer of national income estimates in the 1930s and has been described as co-author - along with Simon Kuznets - of the 'statistical revolution' that accompanied the development of macro economics.
The lecture costs $35 ($25 for full-time students who are associated members of the Economic Society of Australia (Qld) Inc (ESAQI) and includes a two-course lunch and refreshments (RSVP is May 29).
It will be hosted by the University's Economics Department in conjunction with the ESAQI and is supported by Queensland Treasury.
For more information, contact Margaret Cowan (telephone 3365 6242, fax 3365 7299, email cowan@commerce.uq.edu.au).
