Biographical Sketch of John Hicks

http://www.nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/economic-sciences/laureates/1972/hicks.jpg

I was assigned the economist John Hicks. John Hicks was born in Warwick, England on April 8th, 1904. He attended Balliol College, Oxford from 1922 to 1926 on a mathematics scholarship. While he studied mathematics at first, over his time at the College his interests shifted to philosophy, politics, and economics, and he shifted his course of study to focus on those subjects in 1923. He graduated from Balliol College in 1926 with second class honors. Throughout his career, Hicks taught at a number of British colleges, including the London School of Economics, Cambridge, and the University of Manchester. He became a Fellow of the British Academy in 1942, a member of the Royal Swedish Academy in 1958, and won the Nobel Prize in Economics in 1972 for his work in equilibrium theory and welfare theory.

John Hicks's illustrious research career is know for four major contributions. The first is the introduction of the concept of elasticity of substitution, which shows that labor-saving technological progress does not necessarily decrease labor's share of national income. His second contribution is the IS-LM model, which showed that an economy can remain in equilibrium even with a significant amount of unemployment. The third contribution is his book Value and Capital, which showed that the workings of the economics of value theory can be derived without assuming that utility is quantifiable. The fourth main contribution is the Hicks Compensation Test, which holds that if the value gained by those helped by a particular economic outcome outweighed the value lost by those hurt by the economic outcome and therefore could, in theory, be used to compensate those hurt by the economic outcome, the economic outcome in question is favorable. Hicks's work resulted in a more thorough understanding of economic fields such as labor, welfare, and general equilibrium economics. His work also advanced the theories of other economists such as John Maynard Keynes, whose argument on general equilibrium economics was shown graphically by Hicks in his IS-LM model. 

I did not know about John Hicks before this class. Now that I know about him, I realize his work is important to our organization economics class. His work in general equilibrium theory is relevant to virtually all fields of economics. His work in welfare economics, especially the Hicks Compensation Test, is especially relevant to our class because some people within an organization will benefit from an economic outcome while others will lose something because of the same outcome, and his compensation test shows that economic outcomes can still be considered positive overall if the benefits outweigh the costs. Hicks's work with the elasticity of substitution is relevant to our class because it shows that the laborers within an organization may not necessarily be harmed by labor-saving technological progress.

References

http://www.thefamouspeople.com/profiles/john-r-hicks-285.php

http://www.econlib.org/library/Enc/bios/Hicks.html

http://www.nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/economic-sciences/laureates/1972/hicks-bio.html

http://www1.osu.cz/studium/nsu/john%20hicks.htm

http://prizeineconomics.blogspot.com/2008/03/john-hicks.html