Should it be the "Brown-Phillips curve" and not just the "Phillips curve"?

Precedence is important in the history of economic ideas. Besides that, people deserve credit for the work they have done. The publication of Bill Phillip’s 1958 paper in Economica, and the subsequent moniker of the “Phillips Curve” that was rapidly attached to his empirical findings, at least in the USA, has attracted a wealth of attention. This attention has ranged over the data he used, the methodology deployed, the interpretation of the meaning of the curve, and the policy implications of his findings. Here I limit myself to one rather academic aspect of the debate, namely whether Phillip’s findings were predated by the work of Arthur Brown in his 1955 book, The Great Inflation, 1939-1951, and indeed whether this prequel offers a superior piece of analysis regarding the relationship between wage-rate changes and the level of unemployment. I argue that, while Brown did not draw an actual curve, his lack of a visual simply reflects the complexity and subtlety of his analysis. Basically, he saw the relationships involved in ordinal rather than cardinal terms making rigid regression analysis, at least with the analytical tools available at the time unhelpful. In looking at his contribution, I also consider Brown’s other, broader contributions on wage-rate changes and unemployment found in The Great Inflation and his subsequent macroeconomic policy contributions on the subject before November 1958 when Phillips' paper appeared. In doing this, there is no attempt to discredit the efforts of Phillips, but rather to add to the scholarship in this field by offering a closer examination of some of Brown’s work.