R.I.P. Angus Maddison ~ Key Economic Historian

Sad to hear that Professor Angus Maddison passed away last week 24 April 2010. Friends at Gapminder rightly note that "Maddison’s groundbreaking work has been completely invaluable" and that he was a "pioneer in exploring the broad developments of the world through statistics." One of his main foci was the construction of economic data and national accounts ever further back in time, ultimately calculating the size of economies over the last three millennia. Notes Catherine Rampell in the NYTimes obit...

"In his archaeological excavation of the economies of other eras, he was “trying to explain why some countries achieved faster growth or higher income levels than others,” he wrote in an autobiographical essay, “Confessions of a Chiffrephile” published in 1994. He wanted to know what some countries did right and what others did wrong, and to figure out how growth influenced culture, and was influenced by it. Professor Maddison often referred to himself as a “chiffrephile,” or lover of numbers, a term he invented to characterize economists and economic historians like himself who were prone to quantifying the world."

Lovely man, lovely statistics. Check out his discussion of Chinese economic performance in the long run...