Banksia Association Lecture presented by Professor Wendy Carlin

Vice Chancellor Professor Richard Higgott invites you to attend the 2014 Banksia Lecture: 'Educating Economists - as if the last thirty years had happened' presented by Professor Wendy Carlin.

RSVP essential by Friday 29 August to rsvp@murdoch.edu.au or 9360 6176. Refreshments will be served at the conclusion of the lecture.

Educating economists - as if the last thirty years had happened

The public has a love-hate relationship with economists. They are lampooned for their disagreements and their forecasting failures. But economists are in high demand to provide advice on important social questions such as the overuse of antibiotics or the development of early childhood intervention programmes to tackle inequality.

In Professor Carlin’s field of macroeconomics, economists made some bad predictions in the run-up to the global financial crisis. There was too much complacency about our understanding of managing unemployment and inflation, and household debt and banks were ignored.

We need to focus more on educating economists, to both guard against such complacency and to promote the contribution economists can make to public policy. We should be teaching economics as if the last three decades had happened.

Professor Wendy Carlin

Wendy Carlin is the Professor of Economics at University College London (UCL), Research Fellow of the Centre for Economic Policy Research (London) and Fellow of the European Economics Association.

Graduating from Murdoch University in 1978, Professor Carlin was awarded the Rhodes scholarship and completed a DPhil in Economics at Oxford University. She has taught at University College London (UCL) since 1986. She spent a year at the Social Science Research Centre in Berlin investigating the privatisation of East German enterprises, and is on the scientific advisory board of research institutes in Germany and the Czech Republic.

Her research focuses on macroeconomics, institutions and economic performance, and the economics of the transition of economies from central planning to the market. With David Soskice, she has authored three macroeconomics books published by Oxford University Press. Her latest work is a response to the challenges to macroeconomics posed by the financial crisis, entitled Macroeconomics: Institutions, Instability and the Financial System (2014).

Professor Carlin is a member of the Expert Advisory Panel of the UK’s Office for Budget Responsibility and has acted as a consultant for international organisations such as the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development (EBRD), London, and the World Bank. She is now leading an international project funded by the Institute for New Economic Thinking (INET, New York) to reform the undergraduate economics curriculum.

Banksia Association

The Banksia Association maintains the University’s connection with a special group of individuals who have made an impact on Murdoch University during its 39 year history. Banksia Association members include past external members of the University Senate, individuals who have been awarded Honorary Degrees, Emeritus Professors and others.

The goal of the Banksia Association is to further develop these connections with Murdoch to ensure that it continues to grow as a dynamic, modern university committed to quality in teaching and research and to genuine equality in education. Each year Murdoch University invites a Banksia Association member of national or international standing to deliver the Banksia Association Lecture on a topic of interest.