Seamus Hogan died Friday of a brain aneurysm. He is survived by his wife Sarah, and their three children.
I met Seamus in 2003 when I joined the Economics Department at Canterbury. He was the best colleague anybody could ever hope to have: the kind that makes everybody else smarter and more productive. He set the Department's culture; he was Canterbury's Aaron Director.
Everybody knew that he was the one to go to if you had a problem in a theory paper that needed sorting out. Some folks get theory and have no intuition. Others have intuition but suck at maths (me). Seamus mastered both, and that's more rare than it should be. He was generous with his time, and pulled far more than his fair share of Departmental service - the master of the Departmental and university lore.
Seamus was this year elected President of the New Zealand Association of Economists.
Seamus taught just about every one of Canterbury's serious graduates in economics for well over a decade. He was the best lecturer I have ever seen perform. There was no finer preparation for being an economist, anywhere in New Zealand, than Seamus's microeconomic theory with a capstone of his graduate course in welfare economics. Our students knew it too. His course was not compulsory at Honours, but it was rare that less than 90% of the Honours cohort would sit it.
I see his, and our, students everywhere in Wellington.
If you've read him here, you know him. He'd just had his sixth anniversary as co-blogger.
There'll be more to come here in a few days. This is going to leave a pretty large hole in New Zealand's economics community. And a bigger one for his family.
