David Miles Bensusan-Butt was an English economist who spent much of his career in Australia.
Background
A nephew of the French Impressionist painter Camille Pissarro, and the son of Doctor Ruth Bensusan-Butt (1877–1957), the first woman doctor to work in Essex, Bensusan-Butt was educated at Gresham"s School, Holt, and King"s College, Cambridge, where he was a student of John Maynard Keynes and indexed Keynes"s magnum opus, the General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money.
Career
Known as David, he published his work as Doctorate. M. Bensusan-Butt. Bensusan-Butt acted as an assistant to Keynes, for searching literature and writing references, making him Keynes"s best-informed student on progress with the project, so that one historian of economics has described him as "the favoured man". After a short period working for The Economist, Bensusan-Butt joined the civil service in 1938.
Early in the Second World War he became private secretary to Frederick Lindemann, 1st Viscount Cherwell, then worked for Winston Churchill.
While he was First Lord of the Admiralty, Churchill created a Statistical Section in the Admiralty which was joined by Bensusan-Butt, Roy Harrod, Bryan Hopkin, Douglas MacDougall and Tom Wilson. Bensusan-Butt later joined the Royal Navy, serving on the minelayer HMS Cyclone.
Following the war, Butt moved to the Economic Section of the Cabinet Office and later the Treasury. In 1949-1950 he was seconded to the Australian Prime Minister"s Department, and he spent two periods of one year at Nuffield College, Oxford as a research fellow, in 1953-1954 and 1958-1959.
In 1962, he became a Professorial Fellow in the Research School of Pacific and Asian Studies (RSPAS) of the Australian National University, remaining there for fifteen years.
Doctorate. M. "The ultimate fruits of civilization are slow growths that need a stable environment.".
Views
Quotations:
"The ultimate fruits of civilization are slow growths that need a stable environment.".
Membership
In 1975-1976 he was the most influential member of the Asprey Committee on tax reform, recommending a dramatic change from a complicated system of income taxes to a broad-based consumption tax