John Hicks

Sir John Richard Hicks (April 8, 1904 – May 20, 1989) was one of the most important and influential economists of the twentieth century. His most influential contribution to the field of economics was the IS/LM model, which summarised the Keynesian view of macroeconomics. In 1972, Hicks was awarded the Nobel Prize in Economics together with Kenneth Arrow.

Timeline

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.

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. Before he died, Hicks criticised his own model in a paper published in 1980, asserting it had omitted some crucial components of Keynes' arguments, especially those related to uncertainty.

References

Nobel Lectures, Economics 1969-1980, Editor Assar Lindbeck, World Scientific Publishing Co., Singapore, 1992.

External links

http://cepa.newschool.edu/het/profiles/hicks.htm
John R. Hicks – Autobiography

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Timeline

Career

See also

References

External links