Gordon Menzies

Biography

He began his career as a central banker, and in that role he was sponsored to complete a Masters at the Australian National University, where he won the Robert Jones Prize for the best student. He was a subsequently awarded a Commonwealth scholarship to study at Oxford, with one of his supervisors being Donald Hay. He has won a number of teaching and research prizes. He does not come from a Christian background and has a heart for evangelism as well as integrative scholarly work. 

Academic biography

Research topics

1. I want to measure progress in the social sciences, so as to test Emil Brunner’s idea that modelling ‘the personal’ relies on a correct worldview/spiritual state of the researcher.
    
2. I am working with Donald Hay, UK, exploring economic behaviour from the standpoint of Christian anthropology. The work is partly a critique of existing assumptions in neoclassical economics of ‘rational economic man’, and partly an attempt to model behaviour analytically with foundations drawn from Biblical anthropology.
    
3. If reductionist social sciences like economics are necessarily partial, then correct modelling will over-rule economic modelling conventions. I am working on models of truth telling where agents have deontological ethics, over-ruling economic consequentialist ethics.
    
4. Literature on money priming (the presence of money alters people’s behaviour even if it is not an incentive), if correct, casts the enterprise of experimental/behavioural economics into question, because journals insist on financial incentives.
    
5. Critique of the World Values Survey and, separately, the scholarship of secular progress that draws on it (with Tom Simpson, Oxford).

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