John Hicks

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This article is about the economist. For the murderer, see John R. Hicks

Sir John Richard Hicks (April 8, 1904 – May 20, 1989) was one of the most important and influential economists of the twentieth century.

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Autobiography

• He was born in 1904 at Warwick, England. • He was educated at Clifton College (1917-22) and at Balliol College, Oxford (1922-26), an expensive education financed by mathematical scholarships. • During his school days, and in his first year at Oxford, he was a mathematical specialist. But he was not contented with mathematics; he had interests in literature and in history which he needed to satisfy. • 1923: He moved to "Philosophy, Politics and Economics", the "new school" just being started at Oxford; however he was not adequate qualification in any of the subjects that he had studied. • Economists, in those days (1930s), were very scarce, so he did pick up a temporary lectureship at the London School of Economics and managed to get continued. He started as a labor economist, doing descriptive work on industrial relations, but, gradually, he moved over to the analytical side. Then he found that his mathematics, by that time almost forgotten, could be revived, and were sufficient to cope with what anyone used in economics. • 1935: He married Ursula Webb. • 1935 – 1938: He lectured at Cambridge and was mainly occupied in writing Value and Capital which was based on the work he had done in London. • 1938 to 1946: He was Professor at the University of Manchester. It was there that he did his main work on welfare economics, with its application to social accounting. • In 1946 he returned to Oxford, first as a research fellow of Nuffield College (1946-52), then as Drummond Professor of Political Economy (1952-65), and finally as a research fellow of All Souls College (1965-71). • He was knighted in 1964. • 1972: He shared the Nobel Prize with Kenneth J. Arrow. • John R. Hicks died on May 20, 1989

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Career

He spent the years from 1935 to 1938 at the University of Cambridge, mainly occupied with writing on his book Value and Capital. From 1938 to 1946 Hicks was a Professor at the Victoria University of Manchester. In 1946 he returned to Oxford, first being a research fellow of Nuffield College (1946-1965), then becoming Drummond Professor of Political Economics (1952-1965), and, after that, research fellow of All Souls College (1965-1971).

Hicks shared the Bank of Sweden Prize in Economic Sciences in 1972. He developed the famous "compensation" criteria called Kaldor-Hicks efficiency for welfare comparisons in 1939. He collaborated much with the economist Sir R G D Allen, a Professor at LSE. His most influential contribution has come to be called the Hicks-Hansen IS-LM Model which, based on the theories of John Maynard Keynes (See Keynsianism, Macroeconomics), describes the economy as a balance between three commodities: money, consumption and investment.

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Main contributions

• The first was his introduction of the idea of the elasticity of substitution in his 1930 article and 1932 book, Theory of Wages. Hicks used it to show, contrary to the Marxist allegation, that labor-saving technical progress—the kind that we generally have—does not necessarily reduce labor's share of national income. • His second major contribution was his invention of what is called the IS-LM model. The IS-LM model is a graphical depiction of the argument Keynes gave in the General Theory about how an economy could be in equilibrium with less than full employment. Hicks published it in a journal article the year after Keynes's book was published. • Hicks's third major contribution was his book Value and Capital. In it he showed that most of what economists understood and believed about value theory (the theory about why goods have value) can be derived without having to assume that utility is measurable. His book was also one of the first works on general equilibrium theory; the theory about how all markets fit together and reaches equilibrium. It helped to resolve basic conflicts between business-cycle theory and the equilibrium theory which holds that economic forces tend to balance one another rather than simply reflect cyclical trends. • Hicks's fourth contribution was the idea of the compensation test. Before his test economists were hesitant to say that one particular outcome was preferable to another. The reason was that even a policy that benefited millions of people could hurt some people.

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See also

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Reference

Main contributions part is taken from http://www.econlib.org/library/Enc/bios/Hicks.html

Autobiography is taken from http://nobelprize.org/economics/laureates/1972/hicks-autobio.html

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External links

ca:John Hicks de:John Richard Hicks es:John Hicks fr:John Hicks it:John R. Hicks ja:ジョン・ヒックス pl:John Hicks pt:John Richard Hicks ru:Хикс, Джон Ричард zh:约翰·希克斯

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