Andrew Leigh (Fenner, Australian Labor Party, Shadow Assistant Minister for Treasury) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

Earlier this year, Alan Krueger died. He was one of the leading labour economists of his generation, having done path-breaking research on minimum wages and employment, education, terrorism, health care, the opioid epidemic and the gig economy. He pioneered the Great Gatsby curve and wrote Rockonomics, published posthumously. He served as Barack Obama's chair of Council of Economic Advisers, and, in my dealings with him, he was always generous, deeply engaged and willing to share his advice.

We also recently lost Mark Kleiman, a criminologist who worked on issues around drug crime, probation and policing. Mark's book When Brute Force Fails had a profound impact on me, showing, as it did, the importance of certainty over severity when dealing with people with short attention spans. He gave to evidence a parliamentary committee here in 2013 and was generous to me, as he was to many policymakers.