Gavin Cameron

One of the pleasures of blogging is that I have acquired over the years a stable of regular correspondents in academia and other areas of specialist knowledge in subjects that I write about. These various experts are of immense help in criticising my arguments, or pointing out errors of fact and interpretation in them. The articles I write for wider publication are less fallible than they otherwise would be if I didn't have these correspondents.

I'm very saddened to read in The Times today an obituary of one of my correspondents, Gavin Cameron, Reader in Macroeconomics at Lady Margaret Hall, Oxford. Gavin suffered from cystic fibrosis, and died earlier this month at the age of only 38. As we never met, I feel a little presumptuous in marking his death. I can only say that, just from our correspondence, I can easily recognise the intellectual and expository gifts that the obituary refers to.

He had a remarkably wide range of expertise, an abiding interest in economic policy and a talent for cogent expression. Those who worked with him appreciated his astonishingly quick grasp of arguments, his ability to work through long logical sequences, and his outstanding programming skills.

Here is an email I received from Gavin after I had written a piece in support of a smoking ban. (My policy with emails is to publish them only with permission, and then not to identify the author by name.) His criticisms are a pellucid argument that the alternative courses I present do not exhaust the available policy options. The ellipses mark where he graciously said that he enjoyed reading this site; I took the sentence out when posting his comments here, but I much appreciated it. I'm terribly sorry that I won't hear from him again, and that his academic field, his university and most of all his wife have lost such a talented man.