On April 8, a column in the New York Times contained a live link to a 2016 paper in the Journal & Proceedings of the RSNSW. The linked paper was “The Curious Economist: William Stanley Jevons in Sydney,” by Ian Castles. The column (which requires subscription access) was “The Economic Luminary Who Loved Solar Eclipses. Inspired by science, William Stanley Jevons strove to make economics a more rigorous field,” by Peter Coy.
The occasion was the recent solar eclipse in the eastern USA. Coy quoted a description by Jevons of the total eclipse of the Sun from Sydney on 26 March 1857 in the Castles paper, which had been a 2004 address at the opening of an exhibition at the Powerhouse Museum to celebrate Jevons’ time in Sydney in the 1850s. Robert Marks published it in his first issue as Editor of JProcRSNSW to signal that an earlier economist, one of the founders of classical microeconomics, had also been a Fellow of the Society — or at least of its antecedent, the Philosophical Society of NSW.
While Peter Coy cannot remember how he came across the Castles paper, it’s certainly the best publicity we’ve ever had.