Academy Fellow

Obituary

Bob Wallace, a significant Australian economist, died on 10 March 2023, aged 92.

A graduate in Commerce of the University of Melbourne, Wallace took the B. Phil. at Oxford. He then joined the Economics Department at the University of Adelaide. The department was headed at the time by P H Karmel, an eminent macroeconomist, demographer and authority on educational administration. Karmel in 1961 became the head of the University of Adelaide at Bedford Park, which in 1966 was converted to the Flinders University of South Australia, with Karmel as Vice-Chancellor.

The inaugural Professor of Economics at Flinders, Keith Hancock, persuaded Wallace to join him at Flinders, where he remained until his retirement. Wallace made his mark as an outstanding teacher, a productive researcher and a contributor to the formation of public policy.  

Kathryn Moore, one of the students in the 1966 intake at Flinders, spoke at the memorial function held in May 2023. In the course of her tribute to Wallace’s role as a teacher, she said:

Bob had a wonderful enthusiasm for Economics. Certainly, he drilled us in the technical aspects of the discipline but with a lightness of touch more akin to that of Alice in Wonderland than a sergeant major. Bob was taking us on a great adventure. It was serious business but we were going to have an exhilarating and enjoyable time. Bob was able to bring the subject to life, to illuminate with everyday examples where economic thinking could be applied. He had a way of making the theory tangible and relevant. It was here that big policy issues were raised and where Economics offered practical solutions for the common good.

Other ex-students have described Wallace as the best teacher they ever had.

In the earlier part of his career as an economist, Wallace was primarily but not exclusively a macroeconomist. He collaborated in various publications with Peter Karmel, Geoff Harcourt, Ron Hirst, Mervyn Lewis and Mike Artis. Economic Activity, written with Karmel and Harcourt and published in 1967, was widely used in the teaching of macroeconomics. With Artis and Hancock, he assisted Gough Whitlam, as Leader of the Opposition, in the preparation of a budget reply.

Wallace and Hancock were authors of the first Australian edition of Paul Samuelson’s Economics, published in 1970. In a note prepared for the Academy of the Social Sciences’ Wallace wrote:

Samuelson gave us a free hand (subject to proper acknowledgment) and we made good use of it, leading Samuelson in a lecture in Canberra to say he was led to believe he would not fully understand Samuelson’s Economics until he read the Australian edition. Nevertheless he and his publishers agreed to two further editions.

At some stage in the 1970s, Wallace, as economist, converted from macro- to micro-. Artis and Wallace, in a budget-by-budget account, concluded that counter-cyclical policy action, 1945 to 1966, was never quite right in terms of its timing and extent. His own account of the conversion (also taken from his Academy note) is:

The emergence of entrenched stagflation in the 1970s sorely tested economic theorists. When his grandson asked the Nobel laureate what he was doing about it, Samuelson replied, ‘Son, I am worrying.’ I gave up macroeconomics, regretting I had not balanced Samuelson’s forceful Yang with the Nobel laureate Hayek’s moderating Yin—and moved on to the second career.

Wallace’s projects in the latter part of his career as an economist included government-funded inquiries into the training of nurses in the CAE sector and costs of alternative forms of aged care. PM Bob Hawke personally requested Wallace to become a Commissioner in an Inquiry into logging of the Lemonthyme in Tasmania (1987-88). He was a member of the Industries Assistance Commission’s inquiry into the pharmaceutical industry (1986), which successfully recommended far-reaching changes. With Jeff Richardson, he authored the chapter on Health Economics for the Academy’s Surveys of Australian Economics, edited by Fred Gruen (1993).

Wallace was elected a Fellow of the Academy of the Social Sciences in 1978 and awarded a Jubilee Fellowship in 2018. In retirement, ever the teacher, he became an accredited Tai Chi instructor.

*Obituary written by Keith Hancock, Emeritus Professor, Flinders University and Jonathan Pincus, Visiting Professor, Adelaide University