what you really think. Explain yourself." I was highly amused. "What on earth does mugwumping mean," I wondered. I knew what a mug was, or thought I did. My thoughts were about the look on one's face, a look of someone silly, mistaken, or full of himself. I thought, "Well! I can't really argue with that. He has a point." But, I was wrong.Ronald Brech was a wonderful professional economist to work for. I had got my job arriving three hours late for my appointment wearing a trilby. Marjory, his secretary, burst out laughing, the minute I poked my head in the door. It was quite off putting, but I survived a three hour interview and meal at a local pub. Ronald's brother, Edward, is and was an eminent business management consultant and Ronald himself, an economist, had a history of business problem solving behind him. Ronald worked with Patrick Rivett an expert in Operations Research. Together, Ronald, Edward and Patrick were a formidable team of experts in their fields. Ronald was considered the best in the business of providing economic and business advice to companies in the real world. He kept up his contacts in the economist and publishing world and had regular jaunts to the Reform Club in London, an exclusive men's club, where men talked about important issues if you remember Filias Fogg and Around the World in Eighty Days.
Ronald had a list of exclusive clients in a range of vastly different industrial sectors. His world and speciality was the real economy, the workplace of ordinary people, where the real work was being done to pay for Britain's imbalance of payments. It was not the comfortable world of banking that I would join years later with armchair advice and peekaboo analysis.
Ronald's world was an in depth world and he understood it better than any other person alive. An he still does! I was so lucky to join this world working for him, despite my wugmump attitude. We referred to the client companies by code and used their code names in discussions, never their real names. It gave the work a sense of mystery and importance, which of course, it was. I just never really understood how important it was being with a true master of forecasting and analysis. Me, a very wet young 22 with a green masters degree at the baby age of 21. Supposedly, I was a sophisticated statistician, or econometrician, to be more exact. Reality was that I was raw and full of chaotic unpolished ideas. My world was a world of numbers, facts, and mathematical statistics. I would attend evening classes at Birkbeck College and study under the biometrician Cox, who regarded economic statistics with contempt. It was excellent training. Ronald, himself was the Chairman of the Institute of Statisticians, in London, England. He nurtured me through the maze of economic and statistical analysis techniques that even today are state-of-the-art. I could work as an economic consultant, but I am aware of mugwumping, of fence sitting. What Ronald taught me was that it is important to take a view, to get off the fence, to let others have something to measure against even if you know you are wrong or dealing with uncertainty.
I have taught econometrics to some of the best economists in the world. but they were no good until they stopped mugwumping. I would use a technique of Ronald Brech which he referred to as figure less accounting, 'figgaless,' which meant that you had to decide whether some economic variable was going to be more +, less -, or unchanged =. From there you went on to learn how to arrive at an actual percentage change that was credible. I went on to use forecasting techniques learned at Ronald Brech that made future employers many millions.