Farewell Danny Gabay

They say that economists are accountants without the personality. That is clearly not something anyone can say about Danny Gabay, who died in May at the tender age of 47. Such was his standing in the London economics community that the turnout at tonight's memorial celebration to commemorate his life and works attracted many of the great and the good from the field of economics, journalism and policy making.

I can't claim to have known Danny well, but whenever we did cross paths he was always engaging, forthright and fearless in his commitment to rigorous and original thinking, as well as being wickedly funny. Those qualities shone through in the many tributes which were paid to him by friends and colleagues. Danny and his colleagues at Fathom Consulting always tried to keep policy makers on their toes, by posing questions which many were perhaps reluctant to ask. He was relentless in his pursuit of questions to which there were no easy answers. But, as he would undoubtedly have said, that does not mean we should not ask them. In that sense, Danny and his colleagues provided a useful sounding board for ideas that needed to be aired but somehow never found a forum, and hopefully Fathom will keep up the good work.

Danny hated consensus thinking and was never afraid to form a minority of one in the hope, maybe the expectation, that the rest of the world would come to see things his way. That he is no longer with us is unfortunate enough, but it is doubly so that he passed away before the criticisms levelled by the likes of Michael Gove during the Brexit campaign. They would undoubtedly have raised his intellectual hackles as well as offending his cultural sensibilities, and a full-throated Gabay retort would have been worth waiting for. Danny was unique amongst economists I have known. He was described by one friend as living for the intellectual fight, and at a time when the reputation of economists has been battered by their role in the Brexit debate, he would have relished the opportunity to take to the barricades. So I’ll raise a glass to Danny Gabay – a policy response of which he would most certainly have approved – and remember his maxim that economists owe it to themselves and to the society of which we are a part, to go on asking awkward questions. Even if politicians don’t like it!