One More Word on J.K. Gifford‪.‬

John King and Alex Millmow (2008) provide both entertainment and instruction in their treatment of the hardly-admired 'crank or proto-monetarist', John Gifford. There is little to be said to challenge their general picture of him as inarticulate and ineffective, but there are perhaps one or two minor points worth noting. (1) One is that Gifford's 1968 Journal of Political Economy paper 'Correlationism', which King and Millmow very reasonably regard as his best published work (2008, p. 54), was not, as they believe, his last. There was Gifford (1969), 'Critical remarks on the Phillips curve and the Phillips hypothesis', published, like Gifford (1967), in Weltwertshcafiliches Archly. This paper is evidently a version of the draft that Gifford sent to Richard Kahn and which King and Millmow say remained unpublished. (2) The published version is indeed a better paper than the unpublished one, not least because it is focused on a criticism of the Phillips curve, rather than mixing that with a rehashing of Gifford's other views. Nevertheless, large sections of the published paper are almost identical to sections of the draft, making its ancestry clear.