John Hicks quotes

John Hicks was a British economist who made significant contributions to microeconomics and welfare economics. His work, including the development of the IS-LM model, greatly influenced economic theory in the 20th century. He was awarded the Nobel Prize in Economics for his pioneering research. Here are 13 of his quotes:

Income No. 3 must be defined as the maximum amount of money which the individual can spend this week, and still be able to spend the same amount in real terms in each ensuing week. (John Hicks)
There is much of economic theory which is pursued for no better reason than its intellectual attraction; it is a good game. We have no reason to be ashamed of that, since the same would hold for many branches of pure mathematics. View quote
John Hicks
I can date my own personal 'revolution' rather exactly to May or June 1933. It was like this. It began... with Hayek. His "Prices and Production" is one of the influences that can be detected in The Theory of Wages; it could not have been otherwise, for 1931 was a Prices and Production year at the London School of Economics... I did not in fact find it all easy to fit in with my own ideas. What started me off in 1933 was an earlier work of Hayek's, his paper on 'Intertemporal Equilibrium', an idea which I found easier to reduce to my preferred (Paretian or Wicksellian) pattern. View quote
John Hicks
The purpose of income calculations in practical affairs is to give people an indication of the amount which they can consume without impoverishing themselves. Following out this idea, it would seem that we ought to define a man's income as the maximum value which he can consume during a week, and still expect to be as well off at the end of the week as he was at the beginning. View quote
John Hicks
So long as we confine our attention to income from property, and leave out of account any increment or decrement in the value of prospects due to changes in people's own earning power (accumulation or decumulation of "Human Capital”), Income No. 1 ex post is not a subjective affair, like other kinds of income; it is almost completely objective. View quote
John Hicks
It is not so well known that it [Keynes's and my own move from thinking in terms of price-levels and the rate of interest to thinking in terms of inputs and outputs] is matched by a movement from Hayek to Harrod. I once asked Harrod what had put him on to the construction of his so-call 'dynamic' theory; he said, to my surprise, that it was thinking about Hayek. View quote
John Hicks
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. View quote
John Hicks
I did not begin from Keynes: I began from Pareto, and Hayek. View quote
John Hicks
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. View quote
John Hicks
Hayek was making us think of the productive process as a process in time, inputs coming before outputs. View quote
John Hicks
The 'new theory of money and the cycle' which is spoken of in the opening paragraph is of course Hayek's. It was from Hayek that I began - where I got to will be seen. Even at the end, I was minimising my differences from Hayek. I could do so because, as I have elsewhere explained (Economic Perspectives, p. 141n), I still thought, like Pigou and Robertson, and Hayek, but by that time unlike Keynes, that 'we were talking about fluctuations, which, since they did not result in complete collapse or complete explosion, could not have engendered an expectation of going on forever. Booms could then be considered as times of high prices, slumps as times of low prices - with regard to some norm, which throughout the which throughout the fluctuations would not be changed, or not much changed'. (John Hicks)
There were four years, 1931-1935, when I was myself a member of Hayek's seminar in London; it has left a deep mark on my thinking... At the end of the discussions in that seminar ... we were, I believe, on the point of taking what now seems to me to be a decisive step. I was, at least, on the point of taking it myself. There is evidence for that in my "Value and Capital", much of the groundwork for which was done before I left London. View quote
John Hicks
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. View quote
John Hicks