John Hicks Quotes

Sir John Hicks was a British economist. He was considered one of the most important and influential economists of the twentieth century. The most familiar of his many contributions in the field of economics were his statement of consumer demand theory in microeconomics, and the IS–LM model , which summarised a Keynesian view of macroeconomics. His book Value and Capital significantly extended general-equilibrium and value theory. The compensated demand function is named the Hicksian demand function in memory of him.

In 1972 he received the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences for his pioneering contributions to general equilibrium theory and welfare theory. Wikipedia  

✵ 8. April 1904 – 20. May 1989
John Hicks photo
John Hicks: 14   quotes 1   like

Famous John Hicks Quotes

“I did not begin from Keynes: I began from Pareto, and Hayek.”

Source: Classics and Moderns, (1983), p. 359 : footnote 10: There is evidence for this, in the paper 'Equilibrium and the Cycle'

“The standard stream corresponding to Income No. 3 is constant in real terms… We ask… how much he would be receiving if he were getting a standard stream of the same present value as his actual expected receipts. This amount is his income.”

Source: Value and capital, (1939), p. 184 as cited in: Asheim, Geir B. "Economic analysis of sustainability." Justifying, Characterizing and Indicating Sustainability (2007): 1-15.

John Hicks Quotes about thinking

“Investment of capital, to yield its fruit in the future, must be based on expectations, of opportunities in the future. When I put this to Hayek, he told me that this was indeed the direction in which he had been thinking. Hayek gave me a copy of a paper on 'intertemporal equilibrium', which he had written some years before his arrival in London; the conditions for a perfect foresight equilibrium were there set out in a very sophisticated manner.”

Source: Money, Interest and Wages, (1982), p. 6
Context: I remember Robbins asking me if I could turn the Hayek model into mathematics... it began to dawn on me that... the model must be better specified. It was claimed that, if there were no monetary disturbance, the system would remain in 'equilibrium'. What could such an equilibrium mean? This, as it turned out, was a very deep question; I could do no more, in 1932, than make a start at answering it. I began by looking at what had been said by... Pareto and Wicksell. Their equilibrium was a static equilibrium, in which neither prices nor outputs were changing... That, clearly, would not do for Hayek. His 'equilibrium' must be progressive equilibrium, in which real wages, in particular, would be rising, so relative prices could not remain unchange … The next step in my thinking, was … equilibrium with perfect foresight. Investment of capital, to yield its fruit in the future, must be based on expectations, of opportunities in the future. When I put this to Hayek, he told me that this was indeed the direction in which he had been thinking. Hayek gave me a copy of a paper on 'intertemporal equilibrium', which he had written some years before his arrival in London; the conditions for a perfect foresight equilibrium were there set out in a very sophisticated manner.

“Hayek was making us think of the productive process as a process in time, inputs coming before outputs.”

Source: Classics and Moderns, (1983), p. 359

John Hicks Quotes

“While economic theory in general may be defined as the theory of how an economic condition or an economic development is determined within an institutional framework, the welfare theory deals with how to judge whether one condition can be said to be better in some way than another and whether it is possible, by altering the institutional framework, to achieve a better condition than the present one.”

Kenneth Arrow and John Hicks (1972) From Nobel Lectures, Economics 1969-1980, Editor Assar Lindbeck, World Scientific Publishing Co., Singapore, 1992 ( online http://www.nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/economics/laureates/1972/presentation-speech.html)

Similar authors

John Maynard Keynes photo
John Maynard Keynes 122
British economist
Ronald H. Coase photo
Ronald H. Coase 19
British economist and author
Bertil Ohlin photo
Bertil Ohlin 11
Swedish economist and politician
Jan Tinbergen photo
Jan Tinbergen 21
Dutch economist
Thomas J. Sargent photo
Thomas J. Sargent 10
American economist
Paul A. Samuelson photo
Paul A. Samuelson 47
American economist
Milton Friedman photo
Milton Friedman 158
American economist, statistician, and writer
Theodore Schultz photo
Theodore Schultz 15
American economist
Douglass C. North photo
Douglass C. North 18
American Economist
Wassily Leontief photo
Wassily Leontief 10
Russian economist