Pigou, Clapham and Sraffa: Wealth, Welfare and Cost Controversies

Gianni Vaggi and Peter Groenewegen
Additional contact information
Peter Groenewegen: University of Sydney

Chapter 28 in A Concise History of Economic Thought, 2003, pp 271-282 from Palgrave Macmillan

Abstract: Abstract A.C. Pigou was born in Ryde on the Isle of Wight, in 1877. He was Head of School at Harrow, one of the great English public schools, won a scholarship for study at King’s College, Cambridge, and subsequently gained first class honours, first in the History, and then in Part II of the Moral Sciences Tripos, which included much economics. He commenced teaching and writing economics not long thereafter and in 1908 succeeded Marshall as Professor of Economics, a position he held until 1943. During the First World War, Pigou avoided active military service as a conscientious objector, working as part of a team of ambulance drivers near the front during the long summer vacations. His war time experiences probably turned him into the recluse he became from the early 1920s. As he grew older, Pigou became the type of eccentric academic about whom legends are made and anecdotes abound. He was notoriously shy of the opposite sex as illustrated by his writing practice. He dictated his books from one of his college rooms, door half closed, to a stenographer in another room and expected her to return the finished product via the college mail service. Pigou was a good teacher. ‘An attractive presence; complete clarity; great precision of thought and definition; a little, but not too much, geometry and algebra on the blackboard; an occasional joke to illustrate a proposition, never a note’, was Dalton’s (a later Chancellor of the Exchequer) impression of him in the classroom.

Keywords: Welfare Economic; Demand Curve; Competitive Condition; Money Income; Conscientious Objector (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2003
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

There are no downloads for this item, see the EconPapers FAQ for hints about obtaining it.

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:pal:palchp:978-0-230-50580-3_28

Ordering information: This item can be ordered from
http://www.palgrave.com/9780230505803

DOI: 10.1057/9780230505803_28

Access Statistics for this chapter

More chapters in Palgrave Macmillan Books from Palgrave Macmillan
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Sonal Shukla () and Springer Nature Abstracting and Indexing ().