Stan and I also noted that Ken Rogoff's conservative central banker could be too inflation averse to be socially optimal. ﻿[6] The optimal degree of central bank independence was ‘chosen by trading off the reduction in mean inflation secured by conservatism against the less than optimal trade-off between inflation and output variability produced by that same conservatism’.
﻿[7] Carl Walsh took up this point in designing a socially optimal incentive contract for central bank governors, and the New Zealanders went a fair  way towards operationalising it. ﻿[8] Third there was the empirical evidence of Alex Cukierman, Alesina and Summers, and Grilli, Masciandaro and Tabellini.