Hicks

Hicks is a surname. Variant spellings include Hickes and Hix.

Surname

John Hicks

Sir John Richard Hicks (8 April 1904 – 20 May 1989) was a British economist and 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 (1937), which summarised a Keynesian view of macroeconomics. His book Value and Capital (1939) 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 (jointly) for his pioneering contributions to general equilibrium theory and welfare theory.

Biography

Early life

Hicks was born in 1904 at Warwick, England. His father was a journalist at a local newspaper.

He was educated at Clifton College (1917–22) and at Balliol College, Oxford (1922–26), financed by mathematical scholarships. During his school days, and in his first year at Oxford, he specialised in mathematics but also had interests in literature and history. In 1923, he moved to Philosophy, Politics and Economics, the "new school" just being started at Oxford, graduating with second-class honors and, so he states, "no adequate qualification in any of the subjects" that he had studied.