John Richard Hicks

Born Apr. 8, 1904, in Warwick. British economist.

Hicks was educated at Oxford. He taught at the London School of Economics from 1926 to 1935, and he was a professor at the University of Manchester from 1938 to 1946 and at Oxford University from 1952 to 1965.

Hicks has developed the general theory of equilibrium of the mathematical school of bourgeois political economy, particularly in such areas of economic analysis as the theory of marginal utility and the theory of economic dynamics and wages. With regard to the theory of marginal utility, Hicks—like V. Pareto—believes that economic analysis could, by virtue of the subjective, psychological basis of utility, dispense with quantitative expression and comparison of the utility of goods.

Hicks has developed concepts of consumer behavior, consumer demand, and commodity exchange and has proposed a number of concepts and theorems that have become very popular in contemporary bourgeois economic science, among them the marginal rate of substitution, the principle of dimunition of this rate, the effects of income and substitution, and the theory of rational consumer choice. In his analysis of economic growth and economic dynamics, Hicks is a major proponent of “neoclassical synthesis.” Like Pareto, however, Hicks views economic dynamics as a series of static states of equilibrium in an economic system. His primary interest is to ascertain and study the conditions that lead an economy to a stable state of equilibrium. Hicks’ bourgeois critics, including P. Samuelson, E. Roll, and B. Seligman, have noted that his models are extremely abstract and remote from economic reality.

Hicks received a Nobel Prize in 1972.