The appendix was on how the economics profession is coming to terms with its role in the great financial crisis.

(meta data) TITLE: How the Economics Profession Is Coming to Terms with Its Role in the Great Financial Crisis - Evonomics

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# How the Economics Profession Is Coming to Terms with Its Role in the Great Financial Crisis

## It's time for mainstream economists to relax the defenses and open up a little.

Swiss psychiatrist Elisabeth Kübler-Ross, a pioneer in the field of grief counselling, identified the five stages of grief as denial, anger, bargaining, depression, and acceptance.

This extract from Economyths draws on her model of grief as inspiration to chart the long, arduous, but ultimately healthy and healing (we hope, it's not over yet) process as the economics profession slowly comes to terms with its role in the Great Financial Crisis.

The ten years since the first tremors of the crisis began in 2007 have been a difficult journey, not just for the world economy, but also for the economics profession.

The status of the field had never been higher than in the two decades preceding the crisis, during what Ben Bernanke and others called the Great Moderation.

Inflation and macroeconomic volatility seemed to be under control, and total national income was growing at an almost steady rate (the fact that total debt was growing even faster was less remarked upon).

In 2002, Alan Greenspan received an honorary knighthood from the Queen for 'his outstanding contribution to global economic stability'.

The following year, Nobel laureate Robert Lucas, famous for his theory of 'rational expectations', told his audience: 'My thesis in this lecture is that macroeconomics in this original sense has succeeded: Its central problem of depression prevention has been solved, for all practical purposes, and has in fact been solved for many decades.

'With its firm grounding in mathematical rigour

, economics was the undisputed queen of the social sciences.

Economists were therefore more than a little surprised by what jurist and economist Richard Posner – author of books including the aptly-named A Failure of Capitalism: The Crisis of '08 and the Descent into Depression – inventories as 'the bursting of the housing bubble (they didn't know it was a bubble), the ensuing banking collapse, the stock market crash, the sharp decline in output and employment, the global scope of the crisis, and the onset of deflation in the late fall of 2008 that created fears of a depression comparable to the Great Depression of the 1930s'.

According to James Heckman from the University of Chicago, 'Everybody here was blindsided by the magnitude of what happened.

Indeed, the crisis came as a traumatic event that left mainstream economists in what Greenspan called 'a state of shocked disbelief'.

Models which were based on assumptions of stability, equilibrium and efficiency were of little use when markets were cratering, real estate was sinking into the mud, and oil and food were spiking.

And since that time, economists have been working their way slowly and painfully through the different stages or aspects of the grief process, as they realise that their elegant models not only failed to predict the crisis, but also helped to create it.

When Economyths first came out, most economists were in a state of denial – especially those at the top of the profession.

Future laureate Tom Sargent said in a 2010 interview "It is just wrong to say that this financial crisis caught modern macroeconomists by surprise."

(No mention of whether the non-modern macroeconomists saw it coming too.)

Laureate Robert Lucas preferred to see the unpredictability as a natural result of future laureate Eugene Fama's efficient market hypothesis (though as Posner notes, that didn't stop him from predicting, shortly after Lehman's collapse, that the crisis would soon go away).Fama

agreed that the efficient market hypothesis 'did quite well in this episode'.

The Nobel committee apparently agreed too.

As reality sank in, economists soon began lashing out in anger at anyone who dared criticise their field, including yours truly (I'm going to talk about this because it seems to be quite a general problem).

At Canada's top-ranked economics blog Worthwhile Canadian Initiative, for example, a group of prominent academics, including regular contributors to national publications (Globe and Mail, National Post, Maclean's, Literary Review of Canada, etc.),shared their professional thoughts about the book online.

Descriptors used included idiotic, ignorant, intellectually lazy, juvenile, random, rubbish, semi-articulated, and 'sort of like Malcolm Gladwell without the insight' – ouch.

Someone even compared me to a climate change denier (not uncommon, as it turns out).

One commenter described the online book burning as part of a widely-deployed 'shoot the messenger' strategy against critics.

Which is fine – we give as good as we get, and at least they don't grade us.

But what was interesting about their discussion was the way these academics, who hailed from top universities such as British Columbia, Carleton, Laval, and so on, managed to maintain the illusion that they were being incredibly tolerant and open to criticism.

As one put it, 'Economists welcome criticism.

In the academy, we are well-known, if not infamous, for being direct, abrupt, and rude in criticizing each other (and others).

There is a very healthy discussion about methodology.

But they confused academic bickering with genuine criticism from people who share none of their biases.

The site linked to an even more vituperative blog review by an economics professor at the University of Victoria who of course took pains to say that economics 'benefits from criticism', as long as it's the right type, a topic we discuss further below.

(Fortunately I was spared the electronic 'viruses and hate mail' which have apparently afflicted other critics of mainstream economics.)

And that was about it for thoughtful response from the country's economics establishment, at least until former Deputy Governor of the Bank of Canada William White (now at OECD) – one of the few people who warned of the financial crisis – cited the paperback edition as a Bloomberg Best Book of 2013, perhaps out of sympathy.

As anger started to burn out, the next stage of the drawn-out and generally exhausting grief process involved bargaining: both with the future – perhaps we can put things right – and in a kind of retroactive bargaining with the past, saying that the event would not have occurred if only something had been done differently.

One common argument, anticipated in the book's introductory chapter, was that there is nothing wrong with economics per se, the problem is one of poor communication: the field's critics just don't understand the full rich diversity of economic thought, and are attacking a simplified caricature.

A good illustration of this approach was the 2015 book Economics Rules by Dani Rodrik from Harvard.

Echoing Lionel Robbins – who called economic man an 'expository device' in 1932 – Rodrick explains that the reason student groups such as the Post-Crash Economics Society are frustrated is that introductory economics courses offer only a pared down version of the theory and give 'little sense of the diversity of conclusions in economics'.

Also most economists are poor at presenting their arguments to the public, because they 'see themselves as scientists and researchers whose job it is to write academic papers'.

Rodrik does note the existence of a 'guild mentality' in economics which 'renders the profession insular and immune to outside criticism', and observes in a couple of places that 'Only card-carrying members of the profession are viewed as legitimate participants in economic debates'.

Yet later he cites the influence of behavioural psychologists and so on to conclude that 'the view of economics as an insular, inbred discipline closed to outside influence is more caricature than reality'.

The overall impression is one of bemusement at all the fuss.

After making a number of good points about models, the book concludes with 'Ten Commandments' (aka 'bargaining points') for economists, and ten for non-economists.

Some of these are very sensible – #3 from the latter list, for example, says: 'Analysis requires simplicity; beware of incoherence that passes itself off as complexity.'

Others are versions of common defences against critics, e.g. #9: 'If you think all economists think alike, attend one of their seminars', and #10: 'If you think economists are especially rude to noneconomists, attend one of their seminars.'

These are surely well-meant and sound fairly innocuous, unless you're afraid of economics seminars, but they come up all the time in different guises and it's worth inspecting them a little more closely.

The first is a polite variation of the 'caricature' or 'straw man' argument, implying that economics is far more diverse and complicated than it appears to an outsider.

However, the fact that economists do not agree on every point does not somehow innoculate the field against criticism; and the claim or implication that non-economists don't fully understand the subject, and need to attend a seminar or take a course to appreciate its mysteries, often boils down to a debating or avoidance tactic (and obviously doesn't apply to the increasing number of critics from within the field's own ranks).

It also leads to the catch-22, perfectly expressed in a generally glowing 2017 review of Rodrik's 'marvelous book' by economist and game theory expert Ariel Rubinstein, published in the Journal of Economic Literature, that 'One needs to be an outsider to criticize Economics but one needs to be an economist to do it sufficiently well so as not to be drawn astray by stereotypes', which doesn't seem to leave many people.

Apparently Rodrik qualifies, despite or because of the fact that he 'belongs to the elite of the Economics academic establishment'.

Commandment/bargaining point #10, meanwhile, echoes the idea, also expressed above, that rudeness between economists is evidence of a 'very healthy discussion about methodology'.

I'm assuming this doesn't include hate mail.

First, the main objection to the arguments made by economists concerns not the style, but the content.

Second: as seen below, economists are not rude at all when it comes to questioning their leaders – in fact obsequious deference would seem to be a better description.

Third: lack of civility (at least in itself) is not an indicator of healthy scientific debate, in the academy or in the playground.

I'd say that advertising it probably reflects more an anxiety about appearing robustly scientific.

Fourth: in his 2006 book The Trouble With Physics, physicist Lee Smolin notes that string theorists cultivate a 'brash, aggressive, and competitive atmosphere', though he doesn't see it as an advantage.

He also detects a 'blatant prejudice' against hiring women.

Could these be related – and could macho posturing be a similar problem in economics?

According to one article, by economist Miles Kimball and an untenured female economist who didn't want to be identified in case it hurt her career, some male economists 'may not even realize all the ways they routinely put others down – especially those in vulnerable positions who dare not strike back'.

Finally, and related, rudeness might be fine between equals, but one of the functions of social graces is to help deal with asymmetrical power relationships, of the sort encountered in economics departments.

A 2015 investigation at the University of Manitoba, for example, concluded that while the department head, an orthodox economist, had insisted 'that he was committed to maintaining diversity', his subsequent actions resulted in a change of climate that had the opposite effect.

This ultimately led among other things to 'a violation of academic freedom when orthodox members of the department behaved in ways that discriminated against doctoral students being supervised by heterodox economists'.

According to one professor there was 'serious bullying going on' including threats to interfere with the tenure process.

No wonder the students are calling for revolt (they're so rude).

It therefore comes as something of a relief to us critics that some economists at least may be proceeding to the penultimate, more passive stage of the grief process, depression.

Evidence is provided by a paper by Paul Romer, 'The Trouble With Macroeconomics' (he had also been reading Smolin's book, hence the title), a 2016 preprint of which caused a considerable stir in economics circles.

Sounding almost Economyths-like in style, the first sentence of the abstract announces that 'For more than three decades, macroeconomics has gone backwards'.

It goes on to describe the author's 'pessimistic assessment of regression into pseudoscience' and mention the 'serious failure' of top economists.

Decidedly non-upbeat section titles include 'Post-Real Models', 'Loyalty Can Corrode The Norms of Science', 'Back to Square One', and 'The Trouble Ahead For All of Economics'.

No concrete solutions are proposed for what sounds, to an outsider, like a rather dysfunctional state of affairs.

In the same way that elegant but unfalsifiable string theory has, as Smolin showed, taken over high-energy physics, so mainstream economics has increasingly emphasised elegant but unfalsifiable mathematical models over experimental reality.

Most of the parameters in the models cannot be determined from observations, but are simply made up to give the desired answers.

Events such as crashes are assumed to be caused by external shocks, rather than internal dynamics.

The models can't make sense out of even basic things like monetary policy, which according to theory – since money plays no significant role in these models – should have little or no effect.

However, the problems are as much sociological as they are mathematical.

Just as string theory is characterised by what Smolin described as 'groupthink' about the correct way to approach problems, so some economists see it as 'an extremely serious violation of some honor code for anyone to criticize openly a revered authority figure …

neither facts that are false, nor predictions that are wrong, nor models that make no sense matter enough to worry about'.

Romer, who is now chief economist at the World Bank, notes that he sees himself more as a practitioner rather than an academic, so feels free to speak out and tell it like it is, but many people are afraid to criticise a 'revered leader' because of the 'unpleasant reaction' that it may evoke.

He relates a story of running into a colleague who was so angry with him for criticising a paper by Robert Lucas that 'at first he could not speak.

Eventually, he told me, "You are killing Bob."'

So much for that self-image of economists being open to criticism.

In fact Romer says he was inspired to write the paper after seeing a documentary about the Church of Scientology.

Paul Mason observed in The Guardian that Romer's paper is important because he is not an outsider or a rebel, but 'a doyen of the profession, and from the heart of the US academic mainstream'.

As Bloomberg commented, 'along came one of the leading practitioners of his generation, to say that the skeptics were onto something'.

Which, speaking as one such sceptic, is certainly appreciated.

In fact in some respects Romer probably goes further – even I didn't sum an economic argument up as: 'Assume A, assume B, … blah blah blah …

However, while it is refreshing that some in the mainstream are facing up to these problems, and Romer's paper is written with great courage, a dose of dark humour, and an obvious concern for the state of economics, there is in fact little acknowledgement that these issues have long been debated and solutions proposed outside of the mainstream; and as argued in this book, it is exactly this deafness to other voices which is at the root of the 'trouble with economics', and the reason it has taken so long to confront the fact that there might be a serious problem, let alone actually do something about it.

Of course, depression is a state of mind that involves turning inwards.

But for an area as insular as mainstream economics, the final stage of the grief process – acceptance – will only come when the field finally gets over itself and opens up to new ideas – or even the old ideas that have been there all along.

In 2017 for example the UK's Economic and Social Research Council announced that it intended to set up a network with its remit being to 'revolutionise' the field of economics: 'It will be led by a team of 25 world leading experts taken not only from different branches of economics, but also from psychology, anthropology, sociology, neuroscience, economic history, political science, biology and physics.'

Perhaps those experts can answer some of the questions we posed for them back in the original 2010 edition of Economyths.

As seen in the revised edition, ideas from areas such as complexity science and data analysis are starting to sink in and have an effect.

And some high-profile economists are having a go at new approaches.

Joseph Stiglitz, for example, recently contributed to a paper that uses an agent-based model to account for 'the complex adaptive nature of economic systems, and the implications of money endogeneity' (i.e. the fact that money is produced by banks).

But one thing that mainstream economists won't go near – it doesn't fit with the models – is the idea that economists might not be quite so impartial, objective and unbiased as they appear.

Rodrik, for example, notes that leading economists had bought into the dominant efficient market paradigm which saw markets 'not only as inherently efficient and stable, but also as self-disciplining', and that this 'legitimized and enabled a great wave of financial deregulation that set the stage for the crisis'.

He describes it as 'curious' that other models were not used.

But why would they make that particular choice?

Why were other models, such as Minsky's model of the credit cycle, repressed?

The field of economics has an unhealthily close dependency relationship with the financial sector, which may just have clouded its judgement.

Instead of acting out against critics in a way that embarrasses the profession, or ignoring those who want to help, it's time for mainstream economists to relax the defences and open up a little.

A first step is to untangle those institutional effects and other motivations that have shaped their field and which continue to resist change.

I'm sure there are plenty of sociologists and psychologists (even grief counsellors probably) who can help.

Of course the process can't be rushed, so here is, not a commandment, but a gentle suggestion to economists in this difficult time: ten years is enough.

Time to open the windows and let in the fresh air.

Adapted from Economyths: 11 Ways That Economics Gets it Wrong, Icon Books; 2nd edition edition (September 12, 2017)

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His latest book is Quantum Economics: The New Science of Money.

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9. Economic growth will make us happy
 10. Economic growth is always good
 In each case, Orrell explains the role that the myth plays in economics, discusses the problems it creates, and proposes solutions and alternatives based on ideas from areas such as complexity, network theory, nonlinear dynamics, heterodox economics, and so on.
 The 2017 extended version included a new chapter on the idea that
 11. The economy boils down to barter
 This chapter included a summary of Orrell's quantum theory of money and value. There was a foreword by Cahal Moran. Cahal Moran is a co-author of The Econocracy. There was an appendix "The Five Stages of Economic Grief".


The appendix was excerpted in "Evonomics".

(meta data) TITLE: How the Economics Profession Is Coming to Terms with Its Role in the Great Financial Crisis - Evonomics

(meta data) AUTHOR: http://www.facebook.com/evonomics

(meta data) PUBLISHER: http://www.facebook.com/evonomics

# How the Economics Profession Is Coming to Terms with Its Role in the Great Financial Crisis

## It's time for mainstream economists to relax the defenses and open up a little.

Swiss psychiatrist Elisabeth Kübler-Ross, a pioneer in the field of grief counselling, identified the five stages of grief as denial, anger, bargaining, depression, and acceptance.

This extract from Economyths draws on her model of grief as inspiration to chart the long, arduous, but ultimately healthy and healing (we hope, it's not over yet) process as the economics profession slowly comes to terms with its role in the Great Financial Crisis.

The ten years since the first tremors of the crisis began in 2007 have been a difficult journey, not just for the world economy, but also for the economics profession.

The status of the field had never been higher than in the two decades preceding the crisis, during what Ben Bernanke and others called the Great Moderation.

Inflation and macroeconomic volatility seemed to be under control, and total national income was growing at an almost steady rate (the fact that total debt was growing even faster was less remarked upon).

In 2002, Alan Greenspan received an honorary knighthood from the Queen for 'his outstanding contribution to global economic stability'.

The following year, Nobel laureate Robert Lucas, famous for his theory of 'rational expectations', told his audience: 'My thesis in this lecture is that macroeconomics in this original sense has succeeded: Its central problem of depression prevention has been solved, for all practical purposes, and has in fact been solved for many decades.

'With its firm grounding in mathematical rigour

, economics was the undisputed queen of the social sciences.

Economists were therefore more than a little surprised by what jurist and economist Richard Posner – author of books including the aptly-named A Failure of Capitalism: The Crisis of '08 and the Descent into Depression – inventories as 'the bursting of the housing bubble (they didn't know it was a bubble), the ensuing banking collapse, the stock market crash, the sharp decline in output and employment, the global scope of the crisis, and the onset of deflation in the late fall of 2008 that created fears of a depression comparable to the Great Depression of the 1930s'.

According to James Heckman from the University of Chicago, 'Everybody here was blindsided by the magnitude of what happened.

Indeed, the crisis came as a traumatic event that left mainstream economists in what Greenspan called 'a state of shocked disbelief'.

Models which were based on assumptions of stability, equilibrium and efficiency were of little use when markets were cratering, real estate was sinking into the mud, and oil and food were spiking.

And since that time, economists have been working their way slowly and painfully through the different stages or aspects of the grief process, as they realise that their elegant models not only failed to predict the crisis, but also helped to create it.

When Economyths first came out, most economists were in a state of denial – especially those at the top of the profession.

Future laureate Tom Sargent said in a 2010 interview "It is just wrong to say that this financial crisis caught modern macroeconomists by surprise."

(No mention of whether the non-modern macroeconomists saw it coming too.)

Laureate Robert Lucas preferred to see the unpredictability as a natural result of future laureate Eugene Fama's efficient market hypothesis (though as Posner notes, that didn't stop him from predicting, shortly after Lehman's collapse, that the crisis would soon go away).Fama

agreed that the efficient market hypothesis 'did quite well in this episode'.

The Nobel committee apparently agreed too.

As reality sank in, economists soon began lashing out in anger at anyone who dared criticise their field, including yours truly (I'm going to talk about this because it seems to be quite a general problem).

At Canada's top-ranked economics blog Worthwhile Canadian Initiative, for example, a group of prominent academics, including regular contributors to national publications (Globe and Mail, National Post, Maclean's, Literary Review of Canada, etc.),shared their professional thoughts about the book online.

Descriptors used included idiotic, ignorant, intellectually lazy, juvenile, random, rubbish, semi-articulated, and 'sort of like Malcolm Gladwell without the insight' – ouch.

Someone even compared me to a climate change denier (not uncommon, as it turns out).

One commenter described the online book burning as part of a widely-deployed 'shoot the messenger' strategy against critics.

Which is fine – we give as good as we get, and at least they don't grade us.

But what was interesting about their discussion was the way these academics, who hailed from top universities such as British Columbia, Carleton, Laval, and so on, managed to maintain the illusion that they were being incredibly tolerant and open to criticism.

As one put it, 'Economists welcome criticism.

In the academy, we are well-known, if not infamous, for being direct, abrupt, and rude in criticizing each other (and others).

There is a very healthy discussion about methodology.

But they confused academic bickering with genuine criticism from people who share none of their biases.

The site linked to an even more vituperative blog review by an economics professor at the University of Victoria who of course took pains to say that economics 'benefits from criticism', as long as it's the right type, a topic we discuss further below.

(Fortunately I was spared the electronic 'viruses and hate mail' which have apparently afflicted other critics of mainstream economics.)

And that was about it for thoughtful response from the country's economics establishment, at least until former Deputy Governor of the Bank of Canada William White (now at OECD) – one of the few people who warned of the financial crisis – cited the paperback edition as a Bloomberg Best Book of 2013, perhaps out of sympathy.

As anger started to burn out, the next stage of the drawn-out and generally exhausting grief process involved bargaining: both with the future – perhaps we can put things right – and in a kind of retroactive bargaining with the past, saying that the event would not have occurred if only something had been done differently.

One common argument, anticipated in the book's introductory chapter, was that there is nothing wrong with economics per se, the problem is one of poor communication: the field's critics just don't understand the full rich diversity of economic thought, and are attacking a simplified caricature.

A good illustration of this approach was the 2015 book Economics Rules by Dani Rodrik from Harvard.

Echoing Lionel Robbins – who called economic man an 'expository device' in 1932 – Rodrick explains that the reason student groups such as the Post-Crash Economics Society are frustrated is that introductory economics courses offer only a pared down version of the theory and give 'little sense of the diversity of conclusions in economics'.

Also most economists are poor at presenting their arguments to the public, because they 'see themselves as scientists and researchers whose job it is to write academic papers'.

Rodrik does note the existence of a 'guild mentality' in economics which 'renders the profession insular and immune to outside criticism', and observes in a couple of places that 'Only card-carrying members of the profession are viewed as legitimate participants in economic debates'.

Yet later he cites the influence of behavioural psychologists and so on to conclude that 'the view of economics as an insular, inbred discipline closed to outside influence is more caricature than reality'.

The overall impression is one of bemusement at all the fuss.

After making a number of good points about models, the book concludes with 'Ten Commandments' (aka 'bargaining points') for economists, and ten for non-economists.

Some of these are very sensible – #3 from the latter list, for example, says: 'Analysis requires simplicity; beware of incoherence that passes itself off as complexity.'

Others are versions of common defences against critics, e.g. #9: 'If you think all economists think alike, attend one of their seminars', and #10: 'If you think economists are especially rude to noneconomists, attend one of their seminars.'

These are surely well-meant and sound fairly innocuous, unless you're afraid of economics seminars, but they come up all the time in different guises and it's worth inspecting them a little more closely.

The first is a polite variation of the 'caricature' or 'straw man' argument, implying that economics is far more diverse and complicated than it appears to an outsider.

However, the fact that economists do not agree on every point does not somehow innoculate the field against criticism; and the claim or implication that non-economists don't fully understand the subject, and need to attend a seminar or take a course to appreciate its mysteries, often boils down to a debating or avoidance tactic (and obviously doesn't apply to the increasing number of critics from within the field's own ranks).

It also leads to the catch-22, perfectly expressed in a generally glowing 2017 review of Rodrik's 'marvelous book' by economist and game theory expert Ariel Rubinstein, published in the Journal of Economic Literature, that 'One needs to be an outsider to criticize Economics but one needs to be an economist to do it sufficiently well so as not to be drawn astray by stereotypes', which doesn't seem to leave many people.

Apparently Rodrik qualifies, despite or because of the fact that he 'belongs to the elite of the Economics academic establishment'.

Commandment/bargaining point #10, meanwhile, echoes the idea, also expressed above, that rudeness between economists is evidence of a 'very healthy discussion about methodology'.

I'm assuming this doesn't include hate mail.

First, the main objection to the arguments made by economists concerns not the style, but the content.

Second: as seen below, economists are not rude at all when it comes to questioning their leaders – in fact obsequious deference would seem to be a better description.

Third: lack of civility (at least in itself) is not an indicator of healthy scientific debate, in the academy or in the playground.

I'd say that advertising it probably reflects more an anxiety about appearing robustly scientific.

Fourth: in his 2006 book The Trouble With Physics, physicist Lee Smolin notes that string theorists cultivate a 'brash, aggressive, and competitive atmosphere', though he doesn't see it as an advantage.

He also detects a 'blatant prejudice' against hiring women.

Could these be related – and could macho posturing be a similar problem in economics?

According to one article, by economist Miles Kimball and an untenured female economist who didn't want to be identified in case it hurt her career, some male economists 'may not even realize all the ways they routinely put others down – especially those in vulnerable positions who dare not strike back'.

Finally, and related, rudeness might be fine between equals, but one of the functions of social graces is to help deal with asymmetrical power relationships, of the sort encountered in economics departments.

A 2015 investigation at the University of Manitoba, for example, concluded that while the department head, an orthodox economist, had insisted 'that he was committed to maintaining diversity', his subsequent actions resulted in a change of climate that had the opposite effect.

This ultimately led among other things to 'a violation of academic freedom when orthodox members of the department behaved in ways that discriminated against doctoral students being supervised by heterodox economists'.

According to one professor there was 'serious bullying going on' including threats to interfere with the tenure process.

No wonder the students are calling for revolt (they're so rude).

It therefore comes as something of a relief to us critics that some economists at least may be proceeding to the penultimate, more passive stage of the grief process, depression.

Evidence is provided by a paper by Paul Romer, 'The Trouble With Macroeconomics' (he had also been reading Smolin's book, hence the title), a 2016 preprint of which caused a considerable stir in economics circles.

Sounding almost Economyths-like in style, the first sentence of the abstract announces that 'For more than three decades, macroeconomics has gone backwards'.

It goes on to describe the author's 'pessimistic assessment of regression into pseudoscience' and mention the 'serious failure' of top economists.

Decidedly non-upbeat section titles include 'Post-Real Models', 'Loyalty Can Corrode The Norms of Science', 'Back to Square One', and 'The Trouble Ahead For All of Economics'.

No concrete solutions are proposed for what sounds, to an outsider, like a rather dysfunctional state of affairs.

In the same way that elegant but unfalsifiable string theory has, as Smolin showed, taken over high-energy physics, so mainstream economics has increasingly emphasised elegant but unfalsifiable mathematical models over experimental reality.

Most of the parameters in the models cannot be determined from observations, but are simply made up to give the desired answers.

Events such as crashes are assumed to be caused by external shocks, rather than internal dynamics.

The models can't make sense out of even basic things like monetary policy, which according to theory – since money plays no significant role in these models – should have little or no effect.

However, the problems are as much sociological as they are mathematical.

Just as string theory is characterised by what Smolin described as 'groupthink' about the correct way to approach problems, so some economists see it as 'an extremely serious violation of some honor code for anyone to criticize openly a revered authority figure …

neither facts that are false, nor predictions that are wrong, nor models that make no sense matter enough to worry about'.

Romer, who is now chief economist at the World Bank, notes that he sees himself more as a practitioner rather than an academic, so feels free to speak out and tell it like it is, but many people are afraid to criticise a 'revered leader' because of the 'unpleasant reaction' that it may evoke.

He relates a story of running into a colleague who was so angry with him for criticising a paper by Robert Lucas that 'at first he could not speak.

Eventually, he told me, "You are killing Bob."'

So much for that self-image of economists being open to criticism.

In fact Romer says he was inspired to write the paper after seeing a documentary about the Church of Scientology.

Paul Mason observed in The Guardian that Romer's paper is important because he is not an outsider or a rebel, but 'a doyen of the profession, and from the heart of the US academic mainstream'.

As Bloomberg commented, 'along came one of the leading practitioners of his generation, to say that the skeptics were onto something'.

Which, speaking as one such sceptic, is certainly appreciated.

In fact in some respects Romer probably goes further – even I didn't sum an economic argument up as: 'Assume A, assume B, … blah blah blah …

However, while it is refreshing that some in the mainstream are facing up to these problems, and Romer's paper is written with great courage, a dose of dark humour, and an obvious concern for the state of economics, there is in fact little acknowledgement that these issues have long been debated and solutions proposed outside of the mainstream; and as argued in this book, it is exactly this deafness to other voices which is at the root of the 'trouble with economics', and the reason it has taken so long to confront the fact that there might be a serious problem, let alone actually do something about it.

Of course, depression is a state of mind that involves turning inwards.

But for an area as insular as mainstream economics, the final stage of the grief process – acceptance – will only come when the field finally gets over itself and opens up to new ideas – or even the old ideas that have been there all along.

In 2017 for example the UK's Economic and Social Research Council announced that it intended to set up a network with its remit being to 'revolutionise' the field of economics: 'It will be led by a team of 25 world leading experts taken not only from different branches of economics, but also from psychology, anthropology, sociology, neuroscience, economic history, political science, biology and physics.'

Perhaps those experts can answer some of the questions we posed for them back in the original 2010 edition of Economyths.

As seen in the revised edition, ideas from areas such as complexity science and data analysis are starting to sink in and have an effect.

And some high-profile economists are having a go at new approaches.

Joseph Stiglitz, for example, recently contributed to a paper that uses an agent-based model to account for 'the complex adaptive nature of economic systems, and the implications of money endogeneity' (i.e. the fact that money is produced by banks).

But one thing that mainstream economists won't go near – it doesn't fit with the models – is the idea that economists might not be quite so impartial, objective and unbiased as they appear.

Rodrik, for example, notes that leading economists had bought into the dominant efficient market paradigm which saw markets 'not only as inherently efficient and stable, but also as self-disciplining', and that this 'legitimized and enabled a great wave of financial deregulation that set the stage for the crisis'.

He describes it as 'curious' that other models were not used.

But why would they make that particular choice?

Why were other models, such as Minsky's model of the credit cycle, repressed?

The field of economics has an unhealthily close dependency relationship with the financial sector, which may just have clouded its judgement.

Instead of acting out against critics in a way that embarrasses the profession, or ignoring those who want to help, it's time for mainstream economists to relax the defences and open up a little.

A first step is to untangle those institutional effects and other motivations that have shaped their field and which continue to resist change.

I'm sure there are plenty of sociologists and psychologists (even grief counsellors probably) who can help.

Of course the process can't be rushed, so here is, not a commandment, but a gentle suggestion to economists in this difficult time: ten years is enough.

Time to open the windows and let in the fresh air.

Adapted from Economyths: 11 Ways That Economics Gets it Wrong, Icon Books; 2nd edition edition (September 12, 2017)

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When Wall Street Owns Main Street — Literally Insanely Concentrated Wealth Is Strangling Our Prosperity

David Orrell is an applied mathematician and author of popular science books.

He studied mathematics at the University of Alberta, and obtained his doctorate from Oxford University on the prediction of nonlinear systems.

His latest book is Quantum Economics: The New Science of Money.

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9. Economic growth will make us happy
 10. Economic growth is always good
 In each case, Orrell explains the role that the myth plays in economics, discusses the problems it creates, and proposes solutions and alternatives based on ideas from areas such as complexity, network theory, nonlinear dynamics, heterodox economics, and so on.
 The 2017 extended version included a new chapter on the idea that
 11. The economy boils down to barter
 This chapter included a summary of Orrell's quantum theory of money and value. There was a foreword by Cahal Moran. Cahal Moran is a co-author of The Econocracy. There was an appendix "The Five Stages of Economic Grief". The appendix was on how the economics profession is coming to terms with its role in the great financial crisis.


Originally proposed by the Olmsted Brothers, architects involved in the planning for Portland's Lewis and Clark Centennial Exposition of 1905.

(meta data) TITLE: History of the Loop | 40-Mile Loop Land Trust

The Internet Archive discovers and captures web pages through many different web crawls.

At any given time several distinct crawls are running, some for months, and some every day or longer.

View the web archive through the Wayback Machine.

Content crawled via the Wayback Machine Live Proxy mostly by the Save Page Now feature on web.archive.org.

Liveweb proxy is a component of Internet Archive's wayback machine project.

The liveweb proxy captures the content of a web page in real time, archives it into a ARC or WARC file and returns the ARC/WARC record back to the wayback machine to process.

The recorded ARC/WARC file becomes part of the wayback machine in due course of time.

The Wayback Machine - https://web.archive.org/web/20150809215451/http://40mileloop.org/wordpress/?page_id=6

The 40-Mile Loop was originally proposed in 1904 by the Olmsted Brothers (Frederick Law, Jr. and John Charles, sons of Frederick Law Olmstead) who were brought to Portland from Boston to propose a park system as part of the planning for the Lewis and Clark Centennial Exposition and World's Fair.

Parks should be connected and approached by boulevards and parkways…They should be located and improved to take advantages of the beautiful natural scenery.

The above system of scenic reservations, parks and park-ways and connecting boulevards would…from an admirable park system for such an important city as Portland is bound to become.

It was a remarkable, visionary concept then when the area was still largely meadows and forested hillsides.

Fortunately, city leaders of the time had the foresight to recognize the importance of parks to a livable community.

Though many outstanding park lands were acquired, linking them was always put off to the future.

In 1904 the desired linking parkways were to be for the recreation craze of the time.

Sunday drives in carriages or the newfangled motorized touring car, for those fortunate enough to have them.

Scenic, separated walking or biking paths were to parallel the boulevards and parkways.

As times and tastes changed, pathways replaced parkways.

That connected system was to be a 40-Mile Loop encircling the city.

The name, 40-Mile Loop stuck, even as the planned loop trail has lengthened to more than 140 miles to include all of Multnomah County and to connect more than 30 parks.

Now, a century later the 40-Mile Loop is nearly complete.

The trail connects parks along the Columbia, Sandy, and Willamette Rivers and Johnson Creek in an almost continuous loop.

There is something somewhere along the route for everyone, whether it is hiking or biking, whether you're in a stroller or a wheel chair, whether you are skating or boarding or even horse-back riding or canoeing.

The loop includes accessible trails and nature trails along forest hillsides and overlooking wetlands and wildlife.

It can be reached by the MAX Light Rail or Tri-Met buses at many points.

It connects to downtown Portland, Gresham, and Troutdale.

It connects major public attractions, institutions, and campuses.

Its proximity makes it easily usable by neighborhood residents, visitors, students, office and industrial workers.

It is our gateway to and through the natural, nearby open spaces so basic to the quality of our lives.

Now, a century after being proposed, the 40-Mile loop is nearly complete.

It is time to complete the 40-Mile Loop.

Next to Columbia River, long segments of the 40-Mile Loop skirt the north edge of the slough watershed, while other segments such as the north–south I-205 Bike Path cross it or, as in the case of the largely unfinished Columbia Slough Trail, run through it generally along an east–west axis. The 40 Mile Loop is a partly completed greenway trail around and through Portland and other parts of Multnomah County.


The project has expanded to a projected 140 miles (230 km).

(meta data) TITLE: History of the Loop | 40-Mile Loop Land Trust

The Internet Archive discovers and captures web pages through many different web crawls.

At any given time several distinct crawls are running, some for months, and some every day or longer.

View the web archive through the Wayback Machine.

Content crawled via the Wayback Machine Live Proxy mostly by the Save Page Now feature on web.archive.org.

Liveweb proxy is a component of Internet Archive's wayback machine project.

The liveweb proxy captures the content of a web page in real time, archives it into a ARC or WARC file and returns the ARC/WARC record back to the wayback machine to process.

The recorded ARC/WARC file becomes part of the wayback machine in due course of time.

The Wayback Machine - https://web.archive.org/web/20150809215451/http://40mileloop.org/wordpress/?page_id=6

The 40-Mile Loop was originally proposed in 1904 by the Olmsted Brothers (Frederick Law, Jr. and John Charles, sons of Frederick Law Olmstead) who were brought to Portland from Boston to propose a park system as part of the planning for the Lewis and Clark Centennial Exposition and World's Fair.

Parks should be connected and approached by boulevards and parkways…They should be located and improved to take advantages of the beautiful natural scenery.

The above system of scenic reservations, parks and park-ways and connecting boulevards would…from an admirable park system for such an important city as Portland is bound to become.

It was a remarkable, visionary concept then when the area was still largely meadows and forested hillsides.

Fortunately, city leaders of the time had the foresight to recognize the importance of parks to a livable community.

Though many outstanding park lands were acquired, linking them was always put off to the future.

In 1904 the desired linking parkways were to be for the recreation craze of the time.

Sunday drives in carriages or the newfangled motorized touring car, for those fortunate enough to have them.

Scenic, separated walking or biking paths were to parallel the boulevards and parkways.

As times and tastes changed, pathways replaced parkways.

That connected system was to be a 40-Mile Loop encircling the city.

The name, 40-Mile Loop stuck, even as the planned loop trail has lengthened to more than 140 miles to include all of Multnomah County and to connect more than 30 parks.

Now, a century later the 40-Mile Loop is nearly complete.

The trail connects parks along the Columbia, Sandy, and Willamette Rivers and Johnson Creek in an almost continuous loop.

There is something somewhere along the route for everyone, whether it is hiking or biking, whether you're in a stroller or a wheel chair, whether you are skating or boarding or even horse-back riding or canoeing.

The loop includes accessible trails and nature trails along forest hillsides and overlooking wetlands and wildlife.

It can be reached by the MAX Light Rail or Tri-Met buses at many points.

It connects to downtown Portland, Gresham, and Troutdale.

It connects major public attractions, institutions, and campuses.

Its proximity makes it easily usable by neighborhood residents, visitors, students, office and industrial workers.

It is our gateway to and through the natural, nearby open spaces so basic to the quality of our lives.

Now, a century after being proposed, the 40-Mile loop is nearly complete.

It is time to complete the 40-Mile Loop.

Next to Columbia River, long segments of the 40-Mile Loop skirt the north edge of the slough watershed, while other segments such as the north–south I-205 Bike Path cross it or, as in the case of the largely unfinished Columbia Slough Trail, run through it generally along an east–west axis. The 40 Mile Loop is a partly completed greenway trail around and through Portland and other parts of Multnomah County. Originally proposed by the Olmsted Brothers, architects involved in the planning for Portland's Lewis and Clark Centennial Exposition of 1905.


(meta data) TITLE: History of the Loop | 40-Mile Loop Land Trust

The Internet Archive discovers and captures web pages through many different web crawls.

At any given time several distinct crawls are running, some for months, and some every day or longer.

View the web archive through the Wayback Machine.

Content crawled via the Wayback Machine Live Proxy mostly by the Save Page Now feature on web.archive.org.

Liveweb proxy is a component of Internet Archive's wayback machine project.

The liveweb proxy captures the content of a web page in real time, archives it into a ARC or WARC file and returns the ARC/WARC record back to the wayback machine to process.

The recorded ARC/WARC file becomes part of the wayback machine in due course of time.

The Wayback Machine - https://web.archive.org/web/20150809215451/http://40mileloop.org/wordpress/?page_id=6

The 40-Mile Loop was originally proposed in 1904 by the Olmsted Brothers (Frederick Law, Jr. and John Charles, sons of Frederick Law Olmstead) who were brought to Portland from Boston to propose a park system as part of the planning for the Lewis and Clark Centennial Exposition and World's Fair.

Parks should be connected and approached by boulevards and parkways…They should be located and improved to take advantages of the beautiful natural scenery.

The above system of scenic reservations, parks and park-ways and connecting boulevards would…from an admirable park system for such an important city as Portland is bound to become.

It was a remarkable, visionary concept then when the area was still largely meadows and forested hillsides.

Fortunately, city leaders of the time had the foresight to recognize the importance of parks to a livable community.

Though many outstanding park lands were acquired, linking them was always put off to the future.

In 1904 the desired linking parkways were to be for the recreation craze of the time.

Sunday drives in carriages or the newfangled motorized touring car, for those fortunate enough to have them.

Scenic, separated walking or biking paths were to parallel the boulevards and parkways.

As times and tastes changed, pathways replaced parkways.

That connected system was to be a 40-Mile Loop encircling the city.

The name, 40-Mile Loop stuck, even as the planned loop trail has lengthened to more than 140 miles to include all of Multnomah County and to connect more than 30 parks.

Now, a century later the 40-Mile Loop is nearly complete.

The trail connects parks along the Columbia, Sandy, and Willamette Rivers and Johnson Creek in an almost continuous loop.

There is something somewhere along the route for everyone, whether it is hiking or biking, whether you're in a stroller or a wheel chair, whether you are skating or boarding or even horse-back riding or canoeing.

The loop includes accessible trails and nature trails along forest hillsides and overlooking wetlands and wildlife.

It can be reached by the MAX Light Rail or Tri-Met buses at many points.

It connects to downtown Portland, Gresham, and Troutdale.

It connects major public attractions, institutions, and campuses.

Its proximity makes it easily usable by neighborhood residents, visitors, students, office and industrial workers.

It is our gateway to and through the natural, nearby open spaces so basic to the quality of our lives.

Now, a century after being proposed, the 40-Mile loop is nearly complete.

It is time to complete the 40-Mile Loop.

Next to Columbia River, long segments of the 40-Mile Loop skirt the north edge of the slough watershed, while other segments such as the north–south I-205 Bike Path cross it or, as in the case of the largely unfinished Columbia Slough Trail, run through it generally along an east–west axis. The 40 Mile Loop is a partly completed greenway trail around and through Portland and other parts of Multnomah County. Originally proposed by the Olmsted Brothers, architects involved in the planning for Portland's Lewis and Clark Centennial Exposition of 1905. The project has expanded to a projected 140 miles (230 km).


The project will connect parks along the Columbia, Sandy, and Willamette rivers and Johnson Creek.

(meta data) TITLE: History of the Loop | 40-Mile Loop Land Trust

The Internet Archive discovers and captures web pages through many different web crawls.

At any given time several distinct crawls are running, some for months, and some every day or longer.

View the web archive through the Wayback Machine.

Content crawled via the Wayback Machine Live Proxy mostly by the Save Page Now feature on web.archive.org.

Liveweb proxy is a component of Internet Archive's wayback machine project.

The liveweb proxy captures the content of a web page in real time, archives it into a ARC or WARC file and returns the ARC/WARC record back to the wayback machine to process.

The recorded ARC/WARC file becomes part of the wayback machine in due course of time.

The Wayback Machine - https://web.archive.org/web/20150809215451/http://40mileloop.org/wordpress/?page_id=6

The 40-Mile Loop was originally proposed in 1904 by the Olmsted Brothers (Frederick Law, Jr. and John Charles, sons of Frederick Law Olmstead) who were brought to Portland from Boston to propose a park system as part of the planning for the Lewis and Clark Centennial Exposition and World's Fair.

Parks should be connected and approached by boulevards and parkways…They should be located and improved to take advantages of the beautiful natural scenery.

The above system of scenic reservations, parks and park-ways and connecting boulevards would…from an admirable park system for such an important city as Portland is bound to become.

It was a remarkable, visionary concept then when the area was still largely meadows and forested hillsides.

Fortunately, city leaders of the time had the foresight to recognize the importance of parks to a livable community.

Though many outstanding park lands were acquired, linking them was always put off to the future.

In 1904 the desired linking parkways were to be for the recreation craze of the time.

Sunday drives in carriages or the newfangled motorized touring car, for those fortunate enough to have them.

Scenic, separated walking or biking paths were to parallel the boulevards and parkways.

As times and tastes changed, pathways replaced parkways.

That connected system was to be a 40-Mile Loop encircling the city.

The name, 40-Mile Loop stuck, even as the planned loop trail has lengthened to more than 140 miles to include all of Multnomah County and to connect more than 30 parks.

Now, a century later the 40-Mile Loop is nearly complete.

The trail connects parks along the Columbia, Sandy, and Willamette Rivers and Johnson Creek in an almost continuous loop.

There is something somewhere along the route for everyone, whether it is hiking or biking, whether you're in a stroller or a wheel chair, whether you are skating or boarding or even horse-back riding or canoeing.

The loop includes accessible trails and nature trails along forest hillsides and overlooking wetlands and wildlife.

It can be reached by the MAX Light Rail or Tri-Met buses at many points.

It connects to downtown Portland, Gresham, and Troutdale.

It connects major public attractions, institutions, and campuses.

Its proximity makes it easily usable by neighborhood residents, visitors, students, office and industrial workers.

It is our gateway to and through the natural, nearby open spaces so basic to the quality of our lives.

Now, a century after being proposed, the 40-Mile loop is nearly complete.

It is time to complete the 40-Mile Loop.

Next to Columbia River, long segments of the 40-Mile Loop skirt the north edge of the slough watershed, while other segments such as the north–south I-205 Bike Path cross it or, as in the case of the largely unfinished Columbia Slough Trail, run through it generally along an east–west axis. The 40 Mile Loop is a partly completed greenway trail around and through Portland and other parts of Multnomah County. Originally proposed by the Olmsted Brothers, architects involved in the planning for Portland's Lewis and Clark Centennial Exposition of 1905. The project has expanded to a projected 140 miles (230 km). The project will encircle the city.


Frederick (Fredrak) W. Fraske was born on March 8, 1872.

(meta data) TITLE: The Last Man Standing | Mental Floss

This past Sunday marked the end of an era in US history.

Frank W. Buckles celebrated his 110th birthday on February first.

He died peacefully at his home on February 27th.

Buckles was one of 4,734,992 Americans who served in World War I.

With his death, there are no more surviving US veterans of that war.

Buckles was rejected by the Marine Corps and the Navy in 1917 for being too small (or more likely, suspiciously young-looking).

Buckles told an Army recruiter he was 21 and that the only proof of his age was the family Bible.

He was inducted and served as an ambulance driver in France.

After the war, Buckles escorted prisoners back to Germany and returned home to Oklahoma in 1920.

Working for a shipping company in 1942, he was captured by the Japanese in the Philippines and spent three years as a prisoner until the end of the war.

Buckles then married and raised livestock on his farm.

In 2008, he became famous as the last living US veteran of the "Great War."

Buckles worked with the World War I Memorial Foundation, and gave interviews which are being made into a documentary of his life called Pershing's Last Patriot.

There are two other documented living World War I veterans, who both served the United Kingdom.

Florence Green, who joined the RAF as a waitress, is 110 years old and lives in West Norfolk, England.

Claude Stanley Choules will turn 110 this week.

He was only 14 years old when he joined the Nautical Training Ship Mercury, and then transferred to the Royal Navy in 1916.

Choules was still a teenager at the end of World War I.

He transferred to the Royal Australian Navy in 1926, and served during World War II as well.

In fact, he remained with the Australian Navy until his retirement in 1956!

He now lives in a retirement home in Perth.

Choules' autobiography is named The Last of the Last.

He is now the only documented living combat veteran of World War I.

Reading about the dwindling number of World War I veterans made me curious about the last survivors of previous wars.

Many are documented from wars going back to antiquity.

This post looks at the last surviving veterans of US wars.

Ostensibly born in 1882, Jones Morgan was a Buffalo soldier who ran away from home at age 15 and served during the Spanish-American War in 1898.

He was not in combat, but took care of Teddy Roosevelt's horses and was present during the Battle of San Juan Hill.

After two years of service, Morgan's parents found him and took him home.

His status as a veteran of the Spanish-American War is in dispute, as any records of his service were destroyed in a fire, which led to the denial of veterans benefits.

Albert Woolson was born in 1847 and signed up for the Union Army in 1864 after his father died in the conflict.

The 17-year-old served as a drummer and bugler with Company C, 1st Minnesota Heavy Artillery.

After the war, he worked as a railroad fireman, a grain miller, a lumberjack, an electrician, and in appliance manufacturing.

He finally retired from his last job at age 86.

After he reached the age of 100, Woolson became a celebrity as a surviving veteran of the Civil War and took the office of senior vice commander in chief of the Grand Army of the Republic.

He was the last member of the organization.

When Woolson died on August 2, 1956, thousands of people attended his funeral and lined the parade route.

Some film footage of Woolson is available at YouTube.

The last surviving veteran of the Confederate Army is considered to be Pleasant Crump, who was born in 1847 in Alabama and joined the Virginia forces at age 16.

Crump was a witness to the Confederate surrender at Appomattox Courthouse in 1865.

He returned to Alabama after the war, where he farmed for the rest of his life.

Crump died on December 31st, 1951 at the age of 104.

Owen Thomas Edgar was born in 1831 and was 14 years old when he joined the US Navy as an apprentice.

Edgar was aboard ship during the Mexican War of 1846, and served until he was discharged in 1849.

He later worked at the Bureau of Engraving and Printing and afterward worked in a bank.

Edgar was 98 years old when he died on September 3rd, 1929.

The American Indian Wars were a collection of conflicts that spanned over a hundred years, from the founding of the United States to the Battle of Bear Valley in 1918, although some sources put the end of the conflicts at 1898.

John Daw was a Navajo named Hasteen-tsoh at his birth in 1870.

He took the name John Daw when he enlisted in the US Army in 1891 and served at Fort Wingate in the New Mexico Territory.

Daw was a tracker who looked for Apaches until he left the service in 1894.

Afterward, he lived on Navajo Nation land in Arizona.

After Daw died in 1965 (the exact date is not known), he was acknowledged as the last Navajo Tracker for the US Army.

Frederick Fraske was born in Prussia in 1872, and emigrated to the US as a young child.

In 1894 the age of 21, he enlisted in the US Army and served with company F of the 17th infantry at Fort D.A. Russell in Wyoming.

Fraske worked as a letter carrier and medic.

Although his unit saw action against the Indians, Fraske never fired a shot, and later said he was glad of it because had nothing against the Indians.

He was discharged in 1897 after three years.

He later worked as a painter and a security guard until he retired at age 88.

Fraske died on June 8th, 1973, at the age 0f 101 and is widely considered to be the last veteran of the Indian Wars.

Hiram Cronk was born in 1800, which makes the fact that he served in the War of 1812 sound impossible.

However, the war lasted until February of 1815.

Cronk was 14 when he enlisted and served for approximately 100 days before the war's end.

He surprised the other soldiers by fighting well at Sackett's Harbor despite his small size.

As an adult, he married, worked as a shoemaker, and had seven children.

When he died in 1905, an estimated 25,000 people came to pay respects to the last veteran of that war.

Cronk's funeral procession was recorded on film.

The Continental Army in the Revolutionary War had many soldiers who were not properly documented, and there are several candidates for the last surviving veteran.

Lemuel Cook was also born in 1759 and survived to the age of 106.

He joined the Continental Army at age 16 and received an honorable discharge signed by George Washington in 1784.

Cook died in 1866, making him the longest-surviving documented Revolutionary War veteran.

Cook dictated his experiences for posterity.

Daniel Bakeman was born in 1759 and died in 1869 at the age of 109.

There were no documents to show that he served in the Revolutionary War, but Congress passed a special act to grant Bakeman a pension two years before he died.

John Gray is another candidate for the title of last Revolutionary War veteran, as he joined the army at age 16 in 1780, four years after his father died in the war.

However, Gray only served for six months, and so was ineligible for a pension.


Frederick (Fredrak) W. Fraske died on June 18, 1973.

(meta data) TITLE: The Last Man Standing | Mental Floss

This past Sunday marked the end of an era in US history.

Frank W. Buckles celebrated his 110th birthday on February first.

He died peacefully at his home on February 27th.

Buckles was one of 4,734,992 Americans who served in World War I.

With his death, there are no more surviving US veterans of that war.

Buckles was rejected by the Marine Corps and the Navy in 1917 for being too small (or more likely, suspiciously young-looking).

Buckles told an Army recruiter he was 21 and that the only proof of his age was the family Bible.

He was inducted and served as an ambulance driver in France.

After the war, Buckles escorted prisoners back to Germany and returned home to Oklahoma in 1920.

Working for a shipping company in 1942, he was captured by the Japanese in the Philippines and spent three years as a prisoner until the end of the war.

Buckles then married and raised livestock on his farm.

In 2008, he became famous as the last living US veteran of the "Great War."

Buckles worked with the World War I Memorial Foundation, and gave interviews which are being made into a documentary of his life called Pershing's Last Patriot.

There are two other documented living World War I veterans, who both served the United Kingdom.

Florence Green, who joined the RAF as a waitress, is 110 years old and lives in West Norfolk, England.

Claude Stanley Choules will turn 110 this week.

He was only 14 years old when he joined the Nautical Training Ship Mercury, and then transferred to the Royal Navy in 1916.

Choules was still a teenager at the end of World War I.

He transferred to the Royal Australian Navy in 1926, and served during World War II as well.

In fact, he remained with the Australian Navy until his retirement in 1956!

He now lives in a retirement home in Perth.

Choules' autobiography is named The Last of the Last.

He is now the only documented living combat veteran of World War I.

Reading about the dwindling number of World War I veterans made me curious about the last survivors of previous wars.

Many are documented from wars going back to antiquity.

This post looks at the last surviving veterans of US wars.

Ostensibly born in 1882, Jones Morgan was a Buffalo soldier who ran away from home at age 15 and served during the Spanish-American War in 1898.

He was not in combat, but took care of Teddy Roosevelt's horses and was present during the Battle of San Juan Hill.

After two years of service, Morgan's parents found him and took him home.

His status as a veteran of the Spanish-American War is in dispute, as any records of his service were destroyed in a fire, which led to the denial of veterans benefits.

Albert Woolson was born in 1847 and signed up for the Union Army in 1864 after his father died in the conflict.

The 17-year-old served as a drummer and bugler with Company C, 1st Minnesota Heavy Artillery.

After the war, he worked as a railroad fireman, a grain miller, a lumberjack, an electrician, and in appliance manufacturing.

He finally retired from his last job at age 86.

After he reached the age of 100, Woolson became a celebrity as a surviving veteran of the Civil War and took the office of senior vice commander in chief of the Grand Army of the Republic.

He was the last member of the organization.

When Woolson died on August 2, 1956, thousands of people attended his funeral and lined the parade route.

Some film footage of Woolson is available at YouTube.

The last surviving veteran of the Confederate Army is considered to be Pleasant Crump, who was born in 1847 in Alabama and joined the Virginia forces at age 16.

Crump was a witness to the Confederate surrender at Appomattox Courthouse in 1865.

He returned to Alabama after the war, where he farmed for the rest of his life.

Crump died on December 31st, 1951 at the age of 104.

Owen Thomas Edgar was born in 1831 and was 14 years old when he joined the US Navy as an apprentice.

Edgar was aboard ship during the Mexican War of 1846, and served until he was discharged in 1849.

He later worked at the Bureau of Engraving and Printing and afterward worked in a bank.

Edgar was 98 years old when he died on September 3rd, 1929.

The American Indian Wars were a collection of conflicts that spanned over a hundred years, from the founding of the United States to the Battle of Bear Valley in 1918, although some sources put the end of the conflicts at 1898.

John Daw was a Navajo named Hasteen-tsoh at his birth in 1870.

He took the name John Daw when he enlisted in the US Army in 1891 and served at Fort Wingate in the New Mexico Territory.

Daw was a tracker who looked for Apaches until he left the service in 1894.

Afterward, he lived on Navajo Nation land in Arizona.

After Daw died in 1965 (the exact date is not known), he was acknowledged as the last Navajo Tracker for the US Army.

Frederick Fraske was born in Prussia in 1872, and emigrated to the US as a young child.

In 1894 the age of 21, he enlisted in the US Army and served with company F of the 17th infantry at Fort D.A. Russell in Wyoming.

Fraske worked as a letter carrier and medic.

Although his unit saw action against the Indians, Fraske never fired a shot, and later said he was glad of it because had nothing against the Indians.

He was discharged in 1897 after three years.

He later worked as a painter and a security guard until he retired at age 88.

Fraske died on June 8th, 1973, at the age 0f 101 and is widely considered to be the last veteran of the Indian Wars.

Hiram Cronk was born in 1800, which makes the fact that he served in the War of 1812 sound impossible.

However, the war lasted until February of 1815.

Cronk was 14 when he enlisted and served for approximately 100 days before the war's end.

He surprised the other soldiers by fighting well at Sackett's Harbor despite his small size.

As an adult, he married, worked as a shoemaker, and had seven children.

When he died in 1905, an estimated 25,000 people came to pay respects to the last veteran of that war.

Cronk's funeral procession was recorded on film.

The Continental Army in the Revolutionary War had many soldiers who were not properly documented, and there are several candidates for the last surviving veteran.

Lemuel Cook was also born in 1759 and survived to the age of 106.

He joined the Continental Army at age 16 and received an honorable discharge signed by George Washington in 1784.

Cook died in 1866, making him the longest-surviving documented Revolutionary War veteran.

Cook dictated his experiences for posterity.

Daniel Bakeman was born in 1759 and died in 1869 at the age of 109.

There were no documents to show that he served in the Revolutionary War, but Congress passed a special act to grant Bakeman a pension two years before he died.

John Gray is another candidate for the title of last Revolutionary War veteran, as he joined the army at age 16 in 1780, four years after his father died in the war.

However, Gray only served for six months, and so was ineligible for a pension.

Frederick (Fredrak) W. Fraske was born on March 8, 1872.


Frederick (Fredrak) W. Fraske is believed to have been the last surviving veteran of the Indian Wars.

(meta data) TITLE: The Last Man Standing | Mental Floss

This past Sunday marked the end of an era in US history.

Frank W. Buckles celebrated his 110th birthday on February first.

He died peacefully at his home on February 27th.

Buckles was one of 4,734,992 Americans who served in World War I.

With his death, there are no more surviving US veterans of that war.

Buckles was rejected by the Marine Corps and the Navy in 1917 for being too small (or more likely, suspiciously young-looking).

Buckles told an Army recruiter he was 21 and that the only proof of his age was the family Bible.

He was inducted and served as an ambulance driver in France.

After the war, Buckles escorted prisoners back to Germany and returned home to Oklahoma in 1920.

Working for a shipping company in 1942, he was captured by the Japanese in the Philippines and spent three years as a prisoner until the end of the war.

Buckles then married and raised livestock on his farm.

In 2008, he became famous as the last living US veteran of the "Great War."

Buckles worked with the World War I Memorial Foundation, and gave interviews which are being made into a documentary of his life called Pershing's Last Patriot.

There are two other documented living World War I veterans, who both served the United Kingdom.

Florence Green, who joined the RAF as a waitress, is 110 years old and lives in West Norfolk, England.

Claude Stanley Choules will turn 110 this week.

He was only 14 years old when he joined the Nautical Training Ship Mercury, and then transferred to the Royal Navy in 1916.

Choules was still a teenager at the end of World War I.

He transferred to the Royal Australian Navy in 1926, and served during World War II as well.

In fact, he remained with the Australian Navy until his retirement in 1956!

He now lives in a retirement home in Perth.

Choules' autobiography is named The Last of the Last.

He is now the only documented living combat veteran of World War I.

Reading about the dwindling number of World War I veterans made me curious about the last survivors of previous wars.

Many are documented from wars going back to antiquity.

This post looks at the last surviving veterans of US wars.

Ostensibly born in 1882, Jones Morgan was a Buffalo soldier who ran away from home at age 15 and served during the Spanish-American War in 1898.

He was not in combat, but took care of Teddy Roosevelt's horses and was present during the Battle of San Juan Hill.

After two years of service, Morgan's parents found him and took him home.

His status as a veteran of the Spanish-American War is in dispute, as any records of his service were destroyed in a fire, which led to the denial of veterans benefits.

Albert Woolson was born in 1847 and signed up for the Union Army in 1864 after his father died in the conflict.

The 17-year-old served as a drummer and bugler with Company C, 1st Minnesota Heavy Artillery.

After the war, he worked as a railroad fireman, a grain miller, a lumberjack, an electrician, and in appliance manufacturing.

He finally retired from his last job at age 86.

After he reached the age of 100, Woolson became a celebrity as a surviving veteran of the Civil War and took the office of senior vice commander in chief of the Grand Army of the Republic.

He was the last member of the organization.

When Woolson died on August 2, 1956, thousands of people attended his funeral and lined the parade route.

Some film footage of Woolson is available at YouTube.

The last surviving veteran of the Confederate Army is considered to be Pleasant Crump, who was born in 1847 in Alabama and joined the Virginia forces at age 16.

Crump was a witness to the Confederate surrender at Appomattox Courthouse in 1865.

He returned to Alabama after the war, where he farmed for the rest of his life.

Crump died on December 31st, 1951 at the age of 104.

Owen Thomas Edgar was born in 1831 and was 14 years old when he joined the US Navy as an apprentice.

Edgar was aboard ship during the Mexican War of 1846, and served until he was discharged in 1849.

He later worked at the Bureau of Engraving and Printing and afterward worked in a bank.

Edgar was 98 years old when he died on September 3rd, 1929.

The American Indian Wars were a collection of conflicts that spanned over a hundred years, from the founding of the United States to the Battle of Bear Valley in 1918, although some sources put the end of the conflicts at 1898.

John Daw was a Navajo named Hasteen-tsoh at his birth in 1870.

He took the name John Daw when he enlisted in the US Army in 1891 and served at Fort Wingate in the New Mexico Territory.

Daw was a tracker who looked for Apaches until he left the service in 1894.

Afterward, he lived on Navajo Nation land in Arizona.

After Daw died in 1965 (the exact date is not known), he was acknowledged as the last Navajo Tracker for the US Army.

Frederick Fraske was born in Prussia in 1872, and emigrated to the US as a young child.

In 1894 the age of 21, he enlisted in the US Army and served with company F of the 17th infantry at Fort D.A. Russell in Wyoming.

Fraske worked as a letter carrier and medic.

Although his unit saw action against the Indians, Fraske never fired a shot, and later said he was glad of it because had nothing against the Indians.

He was discharged in 1897 after three years.

He later worked as a painter and a security guard until he retired at age 88.

Fraske died on June 8th, 1973, at the age 0f 101 and is widely considered to be the last veteran of the Indian Wars.

Hiram Cronk was born in 1800, which makes the fact that he served in the War of 1812 sound impossible.

However, the war lasted until February of 1815.

Cronk was 14 when he enlisted and served for approximately 100 days before the war's end.

He surprised the other soldiers by fighting well at Sackett's Harbor despite his small size.

As an adult, he married, worked as a shoemaker, and had seven children.

When he died in 1905, an estimated 25,000 people came to pay respects to the last veteran of that war.

Cronk's funeral procession was recorded on film.

The Continental Army in the Revolutionary War had many soldiers who were not properly documented, and there are several candidates for the last surviving veteran.

Lemuel Cook was also born in 1759 and survived to the age of 106.

He joined the Continental Army at age 16 and received an honorable discharge signed by George Washington in 1784.

Cook died in 1866, making him the longest-surviving documented Revolutionary War veteran.

Cook dictated his experiences for posterity.

Daniel Bakeman was born in 1759 and died in 1869 at the age of 109.

There were no documents to show that he served in the Revolutionary War, but Congress passed a special act to grant Bakeman a pension two years before he died.

John Gray is another candidate for the title of last Revolutionary War veteran, as he joined the army at age 16 in 1780, four years after his father died in the war.

However, Gray only served for six months, and so was ineligible for a pension.

Frederick (Fredrak) W. Fraske was born on March 8, 1872. Frederick (Fredrak) W. Fraske died on June 18, 1973.


After he moved back to Tanzania from Germany, he became a member of parliament.

(meta data) TITLE: Tanzanian Affairs » OBITUARIES

A veteran of the independence struggle in Tanzania and one of its first cabinet ministers, Ambassador PAUL BOMANI (80) died on April 1.

He had been Chancellor of the University of Dar es Salaam since 1993 and was also chairman of Tanzania Breweries Ltd and Tanzania Distilleries Ltd.

He obtained a diploma at Loughborough College in Leicester in 1954 and later, a Masters Degree at John Hopkins University in the USA.

His first post was as Minister of Natural Resources and Co-operative Development in 1960.

He was subsequently Ambassador to the United States and Minister for Mineral Resources.

But perhaps his greatest achievement was to mastermind the establishment of a huge and highly successful cooperative movement in the Lake Victoria Region in the 1950's which became responsible for marketing the rapidly increasing cotton crop.

President Mkapa led hundreds of mourners at the burial at Capri Point cemetery in Mwanza.

Good Governance Minister in the Zanzibar Government and former diplomat, AHMED HASSAN DIRIA (68) died on March 14 in a German hospital.

He first joined the government as a Labour Officer in Zanzibar.

After the Zanzibar Revolution in 1964, he was appointed Area Commissioner for Pemba.

He became Tanzania's ambassador to Zaire before he was transferred to West Germany and later to Egypt, Japan and India.

He was appointed Minister for Information and Broadcasting in 1989, a position he held up to 1994.

He was then moved to the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and International Co-operation.

He was a staunch defender of the Union between the mainland and Zanzibar.

Sir JAMES FARQUHARSON KBE (101) who died on 17th February, dedicated virtually his whole working life to the development of railways in Africa.

He came to Tanganyika in 1937 and remained there through the war years as District Engineer and then Chief Engineer of the Tanganyikan part of the then the East African Railways and Harbours (EAR&H).

It was in Dar es Salaam that he began the work that pleased him most, the expansion of railway systems.

Expansions completed during this period were the Mpanda line in western Tanzania (131 miles) the southern line (168 miles) built to serve the UK Government's disastrous groundnut scheme and the Singida line (65 miles).

In 1957 he became General Manager of the EAR&H and became involved in establishing a link line between the central and northern lines in Tanzania (425 miles).

This was a difficult time for labour relations as the new trade unions flexed their muscles.

Farquharson was a hardliner in such matters, believing that the railway staff enjoyed better pay and conditions than most other workers.

He faced out several strikes, walking through the picket lines to his office; a newspaper report from the time quoted a union leader advising that there was to be a great party when the General Manager retired.

The split of the railway system in East Africa into its three component parts saddened Farquharson but did not daunt his belief that the railways could still play a key role in the country's development (Thank you Hugh Leslie for sending this from The Times – Editor).

GREVILLE FREEMAN-GRENVILLE (86) who died in February, was described in the Times obituary as 'a gentleman-historian of the old school' and a fearless campaigner to preserve the archaeological remains of Africa and the Middle East.

Amongst the 26 books he wrote were 'The Medieval History of the Coast of Tanganyika' (1962) and 'The East African coast: select documents from the first to the earlier 19th century'.

His interest in the copper coins that were minted at port cities offered the possibility that their dynastic history could be reconstructed from their surviving chronicles.

For many years he was the only person able to identify the coins of the Sultans of Kilwa and Mogadishu.

He frequently pointed to the importance of Kilwa as a site for research.

MARY PEAKE (104) served as a teacher and as a School Supervisor at the UMCA's Diocese of Masasi for 32 years from 1937.

When Trevor Huddleston became Bishop in 1960 he transferred Mary, by then aged 60, to the less physically arduous work as a teacher at the boys' secondary school at Chidya.

In 1969 she moved to Dar es Salaam to teach English at the new St. Mark's Theological College.

Her dining rooms served as a refectory for other expatriate church workers, not to mention a constant stream of visitors to what became known as 'Mary's Guest House'.

During her final years from 1995 she was cared for by the Tanzanian sisters of the CMS next to the cathedral at Ilala – from Rev. Canon Paul R Hardy.

(Thank you Mary Punt for sending this on – Editor).

BRUCE RONALDSON (87) who died on December 2 2004, was a District Commissioner in Tanganyika after the Second World War.

He took a particularly close interest in sport and captained Tanzania at cricket.

He also trained John Akhwari, who entered the marathon at the Mexico Olympics.

Akhwari fell during the race and finished hours after the rest of the field but became an overnight celebrity and symbol of the Olympic spirit when he told reporters: "My country did not send me 7,000 miles to start this race.

In 1961 Ronaldson moved to Britain and became Company Secretary of Oxfam – The Times.

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Ahmed Hassan Diria (July 13, 1937 – March 13, 2005) was a Tanzanian politician and diplomat. He was born in Raha Leo, Zanzibar and was educated in local primary and secondary schools. He started working in government service in 1954, taking a break from 1958 to 1961 to be educated at the College of Philosophy in Ghana. Following the Zanzibar Revolution of 1964, he was appointed the area commissioner for Pemba. He remained in this position until 1965, when he joined the Tanzanian foreign service. He remained in it until 1989, serving as ambassador at various times to Zaire, West Germany, Egypt, Japan and India.


After he moved back to Tanzania from Germany, he held various positions as minister.

(meta data) TITLE: Tanzanian Affairs » OBITUARIES

A veteran of the independence struggle in Tanzania and one of its first cabinet ministers, Ambassador PAUL BOMANI (80) died on April 1.

He had been Chancellor of the University of Dar es Salaam since 1993 and was also chairman of Tanzania Breweries Ltd and Tanzania Distilleries Ltd.

He obtained a diploma at Loughborough College in Leicester in 1954 and later, a Masters Degree at John Hopkins University in the USA.

His first post was as Minister of Natural Resources and Co-operative Development in 1960.

He was subsequently Ambassador to the United States and Minister for Mineral Resources.

But perhaps his greatest achievement was to mastermind the establishment of a huge and highly successful cooperative movement in the Lake Victoria Region in the 1950's which became responsible for marketing the rapidly increasing cotton crop.

President Mkapa led hundreds of mourners at the burial at Capri Point cemetery in Mwanza.

Good Governance Minister in the Zanzibar Government and former diplomat, AHMED HASSAN DIRIA (68) died on March 14 in a German hospital.

He first joined the government as a Labour Officer in Zanzibar.

After the Zanzibar Revolution in 1964, he was appointed Area Commissioner for Pemba.

He became Tanzania's ambassador to Zaire before he was transferred to West Germany and later to Egypt, Japan and India.

He was appointed Minister for Information and Broadcasting in 1989, a position he held up to 1994.

He was then moved to the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and International Co-operation.

He was a staunch defender of the Union between the mainland and Zanzibar.

Sir JAMES FARQUHARSON KBE (101) who died on 17th February, dedicated virtually his whole working life to the development of railways in Africa.

He came to Tanganyika in 1937 and remained there through the war years as District Engineer and then Chief Engineer of the Tanganyikan part of the then the East African Railways and Harbours (EAR&H).

It was in Dar es Salaam that he began the work that pleased him most, the expansion of railway systems.

Expansions completed during this period were the Mpanda line in western Tanzania (131 miles) the southern line (168 miles) built to serve the UK Government's disastrous groundnut scheme and the Singida line (65 miles).

In 1957 he became General Manager of the EAR&H and became involved in establishing a link line between the central and northern lines in Tanzania (425 miles).

This was a difficult time for labour relations as the new trade unions flexed their muscles.

Farquharson was a hardliner in such matters, believing that the railway staff enjoyed better pay and conditions than most other workers.

He faced out several strikes, walking through the picket lines to his office; a newspaper report from the time quoted a union leader advising that there was to be a great party when the General Manager retired.

The split of the railway system in East Africa into its three component parts saddened Farquharson but did not daunt his belief that the railways could still play a key role in the country's development (Thank you Hugh Leslie for sending this from The Times – Editor).

GREVILLE FREEMAN-GRENVILLE (86) who died in February, was described in the Times obituary as 'a gentleman-historian of the old school' and a fearless campaigner to preserve the archaeological remains of Africa and the Middle East.

Amongst the 26 books he wrote were 'The Medieval History of the Coast of Tanganyika' (1962) and 'The East African coast: select documents from the first to the earlier 19th century'.

His interest in the copper coins that were minted at port cities offered the possibility that their dynastic history could be reconstructed from their surviving chronicles.

For many years he was the only person able to identify the coins of the Sultans of Kilwa and Mogadishu.

He frequently pointed to the importance of Kilwa as a site for research.

MARY PEAKE (104) served as a teacher and as a School Supervisor at the UMCA's Diocese of Masasi for 32 years from 1937.

When Trevor Huddleston became Bishop in 1960 he transferred Mary, by then aged 60, to the less physically arduous work as a teacher at the boys' secondary school at Chidya.

In 1969 she moved to Dar es Salaam to teach English at the new St. Mark's Theological College.

Her dining rooms served as a refectory for other expatriate church workers, not to mention a constant stream of visitors to what became known as 'Mary's Guest House'.

During her final years from 1995 she was cared for by the Tanzanian sisters of the CMS next to the cathedral at Ilala – from Rev. Canon Paul R Hardy.

(Thank you Mary Punt for sending this on – Editor).

BRUCE RONALDSON (87) who died on December 2 2004, was a District Commissioner in Tanganyika after the Second World War.

He took a particularly close interest in sport and captained Tanzania at cricket.

He also trained John Akhwari, who entered the marathon at the Mexico Olympics.

Akhwari fell during the race and finished hours after the rest of the field but became an overnight celebrity and symbol of the Olympic spirit when he told reporters: "My country did not send me 7,000 miles to start this race.

In 1961 Ronaldson moved to Britain and became Company Secretary of Oxfam – The Times.

RSS feed for comments on this post · TrackBack URL

You must be logged in to post a comment.

Search all Categories Issue 01\nIssue 02\nIssue 03\nIssue 04\nIssue 05\nIssue 06\nIssue 07\nIssue 08\nIssue 09\nIssue 10\nIssue 100\nIssue 11\nIssue 12\nIssue 13\nIssue 14\nIssue 15\nIssue 16\nIssue 17\nIssue 18\nIssue 19\nIssue 21\nIssue 22\nIssue 24\nIssue 25\nIssue 26\nIssue 27\nIssue 28\nIssue 29\nIssue 30\nIssue 31\nIssue 32\nIssue 33\nIssue 34\nIssue 35\nIssue 36\nIssue 37\nIssue 38\nIssue 39\nIssue 40\nIssue 41\nIssue 42\nIssue 43\nIssue 44\nIssue 45\nIssue 46\nIssue 47\nIssue 48\nIssue 49\nIssue 50\nIssue 51\nIssue 52\nIssue 53\nIssue 54\nIssue 55\nIssue 56\nIssue 57\nIssue 58\nIssue 59\nIssue 60\nIssue 61\nIssue 62\nIssue 63\nIssue 64\nIssue 65\nIssue 66\nIssue 67\nIssue 68\nIssue 69\nIssue 70\nIssue 71\nIssue 72\nIssue 73\nIssue 74\nIssue 75\nIssue 76\nIssue 77\nIssue 78\nIssue 79\nIssue 80\nIssue 81\nIssue 82\nIssue 83\nIssue 84\nIssue 85\nIssue 86\nIssue 87\nIssue 88\nIssue 89\nIssue 90\nIssue 91\nIssue 92\nIssue 93\nIssue 94\nIssue 95\nIssue 96\nIssue 97\nIssue 98\nIssue 99\nLetters\nMiscellany\nObituaries\nPolitics\nReligion\nReviews\nSport\nTz in International Media\nZanzibar\n

Ahmed Hassan Diria (July 13, 1937 – March 13, 2005) was a Tanzanian politician and diplomat. He was born in Raha Leo, Zanzibar and was educated in local primary and secondary schools. He started working in government service in 1954, taking a break from 1958 to 1961 to be educated at the College of Philosophy in Ghana. Following the Zanzibar Revolution of 1964, he was appointed the area commissioner for Pemba. He remained in this position until 1965, when he joined the Tanzanian foreign service. He remained in it until 1989, serving as ambassador at various times to Zaire, West Germany, Egypt, Japan and India.
 After he moved back to Tanzania from Germany, he became a member of parliament.