Heinz Wolfgang Arndt (1915-2002) (Obituary‪)‬

On 6 May 2002 Professor Heinz Arndt, aged 87, died as he drove through the campus of the ANU on his way to give the eulogy at the funeral of his friend and former colleague, Sir Leslie Melville. Although Heinz had retired from his chair at the ANU in 1980, he continued to work daily at his office in University House; he was shortly to visit the Philippines, after only recently returning from Indonesia; he was co-authoring a history of economics at ANU; and he was still presenting seminars, attending conferences, publishing articles and essays, editing an international journal, assisting others with their research, and helping research students by reading and commenting on their work. His boundless energy was the envy of his friends and colleagues. His sudden, and quite unexpected, death was a shattering blow to all of them. Heinz began his career in the 1940s as a macroeconomist, and then from the late 1950s redirected his attention to economic development, especially Indonesia. It was only upon his retirement that his long-standing interest in the history of economic thought bloomed. In 1978 he wrote a book on the evolution of the concept of economic growth as a policy objective (The Rise and Fall of Economic Growth); in 1987 he published a sequel, Economic Development: The History of an Idea. He also wrote a number of sparkling biographical essays on Australian economists with whom he had been associated over the years, including Colin Clark, Sir Leslie Melville, Sir John Crawford, R.I. Downing, D.M. Bensusan-Butt, Lord Roberthall and Helen Hughes. In his final collection of essays, The Importance of Money, Heinz included his insightful piece on the parallel lives of Churchill and Keynes--for Heinz, the two outstanding Englishmen of the twentieth century.