John Hicks was born in 1904 to the son of a British journalist in Warwick, England. Although little is known about his early life, Hicks would go on to study Mathematics at Clifton College and then pursue a specialized education in "Philosophy, Politics, and Economics" at Oxford (1). He would graduate with second class honors, to which he felt provided him "no adequate qualification in any of the subjects" he studied (1).
Despite his humble opinion regarding his education, Hicks would go on to make several critical contributions to the field of economics. The first of which being his idea of the elasticity of substitution, which refuted the idea that developments in labor technology "does not necessarily reduce labor's share of the national income" (2). His second contribution would be advance the work of Maynard Keynes, by inventing the graphical representation of an economy operating at equilibrium with less than full employment. In 1939, he would then go on to publish his book Value and Capital, which among other accomplishments was one of the first works to address general equilibrium theory. His final contribution would be establishing the Hicks Compensation Test, which essentially provided the economic theory to prove that free trade could be beneficial to all parties. His outstanding contributions to the field of economics would award him knighthood in 1964 and the Nobel Prize in 1972 (2).
Having never heard of John Hicks before, his contributions are fascinating to me. I have always found Keynesian economics to be fascinating, and his contributions have likely impacted the world we live in today in an incredible way. Especially the Hicks Compensation Test, the impact that free trade has had on the modern world would either have been long fought or not nearly as prevalent had it not been for John Hicks.
(1) http://www.nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/economic-sciences/laureates/1972/hicks-bio.html
(2) http://www.econlib.org/library/Enc/bios/Hicks.html
(Image) http://www.nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/economic-sciences/laureates/1972/hicks-facts.html
Just about Hicks on Keynes. If you learned IS-LM when you took macroecon, that is due to Hicks. Keynes himself didn't like it and believed it was an over simplification of his work. But the rest of the profession glommed onto it, because it was do-able and akin to supply and demand for micro.
ReplyDeleteAlso, on a technical note, observe that there is a link tool in the Blogger editor, which I encourage you to use. So the links you have at the end of your post, could be clickable. That makes it easier for the reader.
I'm actually taking Macroecon right now! I will keep that in mind when we start learning about IS-LM!
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