2011 Australian Christian Book of the Year

Posted on August 20, 2011 
Filed under News

From SPCKA –

“One of the nation’s leading economists has won the Christian Book of the Year award with a book he regards as one of his most significant contributions to civic life in Australia.

Emeritus Professor Ian Harper of Melbourne Business School, now a partner with Deloitte Access Economics, won the first prize for ‘Economics for Life’, awarded at the 31st Australian Christian Literature Awards on Thursday, 18 August 2011 in Melbourne. 

Subtitled ‘An economist reflects on the meaning of life, money and what really matters’, Professor Harper proclaims economics a good servant but a bad master. One of three panellists appointed in January 2011 by the Baillieu Government of Victoria to carry out an Independent Review of State Finances, Harper declares that ‘economics makes a valuable contribution to clear thinking about important questions that focus on humanity’s material condition, yet it is not a philosophy for the whole of life—and was never intended to be’.

In 2000, Professor Harper was elected to a Fellowship of the Academy of Social Sciences in Australia in recognition of his standing as an academic economist, and more recently to a Fellowship of the Australian Institute of Company Directors.

The Awards were judged by an interdenominational panel of judges and presented by the Society for Promoting Christian Knowledge Australia (SPCKA). Australia’s first library of 4,000 books was sent with the First Fleet in 1788 as a gift to the new colony from SPCK UK. The organisation was founded in 1698 to distribute books and pamphlets in the ‘new world’.”

(More on SPCKA here.)