John Williamson, who defined the “Washington consensus”, died on April 11th

IT WAS IN January 1947, with a song thrush, that John Williamson began the list he kept of the birds he had seen, which would go on to number some 4,000 species. His father, a rose-grower in Hereford, England, was an avid birder too, but Mr Williamson brought to the pastime the focused effort and aptitude for the collection of information that also characterised his work as a macroeconomist and expert on exchange rates. Birding was an understated hobby for an understated man. Yet Mr Williamson gained a measure of fame that eludes most economists when he outlined the “Washington consensus”: a description of policy orthodoxy in the late 1980s that became a flashpoint for intense global debate. Mr Williamson, who died on April 11th at the age of 83, sought merely to gather a list of macroeconomic best practices, the better to boost the welfare of people in developing economies. In that he succeeded, the furore that followed notwithstanding.

Though Mr Williamson had notions of becoming an engineer, a schoolteacher suggested that his maths was too poor, and that he should pursue economics instead. As an undergraduate at the London School of Economics he was inspired by William Phillips, who showed him a draft of a paper describing a relationship between unemployment and inflation—or the Phillips curve, as it would become known. At Princeton University as a graduate student he rubbed shoulders with giants of the profession like William Baumol and Oskar Morgenstern.