Bill Phillips wrote chapter 27 in 1959 while visiting the University of Melbourne, so it is convenient to refer to it as the ‘Melbourne paper’. As he related to Conrad Blyth (1978, xvi-xvii), he had then just finished his 1958 ‘Phillips Curve’ Economica article (chapter 25) which was

Blyth also explained that ‘Bill himself was not very happy with the stable wage assumption found in popular Keynesian models’. The simple Phillips Curve concept was a first attempt to explain wage inflation and adapt Keynesian models so that they could include the reality of rising prices and wages. While the Melbourne paper was never formally published, it can be argued that it was a big advance on the original Phillips Curve work. Had he gone on with it he might himself have modified the simple Phillips Curve concept in ways which others were subsequently to do. The paper is of considerable interest, but it should be said at the outset that it was a working paper, and that Bill Phillips recognised it to be unfinished. There were data problems, the regression results cited in the endnotes do not include standard errors, Rs or other statistics and the theory was in need of tidying up.