Sir John Hicks (Sir John Richard Hicks) Biography

British economist, born in Warwick, educated at Balliol College, Oxford. He became Professor of Economics and a Fellow of All Souls, received the Nobel Prize for Economics (1972), and was knighted in 1964. Value and Capital (1939), his greatest theoretical work, presented the first sophisticated approach to the integration of micro-economics and macro-economics—though not fully taken up by the economics profession until after the war, its arguments now underpin much of modern macro-economic thinking. Hicks was also the inventor of the so-called IS-LM interpretation of the ideas of Keynes; its simple diagrammatic apparatus has since been adopted as the standard textbook presentation of Keynesian economics. A Theory of Economic History (1969) is probably his most accessible work; in it, the development of markets, their increasing sophistication and pervasiveness, is taken to be effectively synonymous with progress and improvement. He published an essay diagnosing what he called The Crisis in Keynesian Economics (1974); and a short book on economic methodology under the title Causality in Economics (1979).