The Art of Economics
John Neville Keynes lived just long enough to see the state of Israel founded, though it is unlikely anyone told him. He died in Cambridge in November 1949, aged ninety-seven, having outlived almost everyone who remembered his name. His son’s fame had swallowed him whole. Yet the elder Keynes left behind a book that deserves a second reading, and not only by economists.
The Scope and Method of Political Economy, published in 1891, divided the discipline into three rooms. The first was positive economics, concerned with what is. The second was normative economics, concerned with what ought to be. The third, which Keynes called the art of economics, was concerned with what can be done. It was the room where theory met policy, where values met consequences, where knowing and caring had to find a way to share the same desk.
John Nevile spent his life in the third room.
He arrived at the University of Western Australia in 1950, the first year in which he studied economics, and knew immediately that the discipline carried obligations beyond algebra. He moved to the University of New South Wales in 1965 and stayed for the rest of his career, serving as Foundation Chair of economics, Dean of the Faculty of Commerce and Economics, and Director of the Centre for Applied Economic Research. He was elected a Fellow of the Academy of Social Sciences in Australia in 1972, served as President of the Economic Society of Australia from 1980 to 1984, and in 2000 was awarded its Distinguished Fellow Medal. In 2016 he was appointed a Member of the Order of Australia. A fellowship at UNSW still bears his name.
But the honour that mattered most to him was probably the one nobody bestowed. In 1962, Nevile published a paper in the inaugural volume of Australian Economic Papers that constructed the first macroeconometric model of the Australian economy. It was a modest thing by later standards, a handful of equations fitted to postwar data, but it did something no Australian economist had attempted before. It turned the economy into a testable claim. It asked not what policy should be, nor what the world was, but what would happen if.
That was the third room. And Nevile never left it.
In 1986, he and his colleague Kim Hawtrey presented a paper at the fifteenth Conference of Economists at Monash University that made the unusual argument that the Prices and Incomes Accord, the centrepiece of the Hawke government’s labour market strategy, could be evaluated in Christian terms. The paper was called A Christian Perspective on the Accord. Nevile had always insisted that economic actions carry an ethical dimension because they affect people, and that the value judgements on which economics rests should be stated plainly rather than buried beneath technique. He quoted Timothy and Reinhold Niebuhr. He argued that the measure of a policy was not its efficiency but its mercy. He asked, in every model and every lecture, a question that economics prefers to leave unanswered: who gets hurt?
It is a question that another economist, born a continent away, would have recognised instantly. Don Patinkin was born in Chicago in 1922, the son of Jewish immigrants from Eastern Europe. He studied at the University of Chicago, considered becoming a rabbi, and chose economics instead. After holding positions at Chicago and then the University of Illinois, he settled in Israel in 1949, when the state was barely a year old, and joined the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. He built the economics department almost from nothing, training a generation of students known as the “Patinkin boys” who went on to staff the Treasury, the Bank of Israel and the commercial banks. He served as President of the Hebrew University from 1982 to 1986 and received the Israel Prize in 1970. He is remembered today as the father of the Israeli economics profession.
Patinkin, like Nevile, lived in the third room. His great work, Money, Interest and Prices, sought to bridge the classical and Keynesian traditions not for the elegance of the synthesis but because getting the answer wrong meant getting policy wrong, and getting policy wrong meant hurting people. Michael Bruno, who had studied at Hebrew University before completing his doctorate under Kenneth Arrow at Stanford, absorbed the same conviction. He helped design the 1985 Economic Stabilisation Plan that pulled Israel back from the brink of hyperinflation, and was appointed Governor of the Bank of Israel the following year. He later served as Chief Economist of the World Bank. He had learned, in the corridors Patinkin built, that economics without consequence is decoration.
Nevile would not have put it that way. He was a quieter man, a churchgoer, an Australian who believed that fiscal policy was not a mathematical puzzle but a moral instrument. He was one of the founders of the Economic and Labour Relations Review. He edited, with Geoffrey Harcourt, Peter Kriesler and Joseph Halevi, four volumes of Post-Keynesian Essays from Down Under. He wrote a book called The Root of All Evil about economics, ethics and capitalism, published by the Australian Council of Churches. He never stopped asking whether the models served the people or the other way around.
John Nevile died on 29 June 2026. He was ninety-three. The room where the Dean once sat at Kensington, where the equations were chalked and the Accord was weighed against scripture, is not empty. Someone else sits there now, working on a different model, solving for a different variable. But the question that furnished the room, the one Nevile carried from Perth to Kensington and Patinkin carried from Chicago to Jerusalem, has not been replaced. It sits in the corner, unanswered.
Who gets hurt?