Sir John Richard Hicks

Sir John Richard Hicks
(1904 - 1989)

English economist who made pioneering contributions to general economic equilibrium theory and, in 1972, shared (with Kenneth J. Arrow ) the Nobel Prize for Economics. He was knighted in 1964.
Hicks was on the faculties of the London School of Economics and Political Science (1926-35), Gonville and Caius College, Cambridge (1935-38), the University of Manchester (1938-46), and Nuffield College, Oxford (1946-52). Then, for two decades, he was a fellow of All Souls College, Oxford, and was thereafter a professor emeritus. His Collected Papers were published in two volumes (1981-82).

Hicks's classic work, Value and Capital (1939; 2nd ed. 1946), helped to resolve basic conflicts between business-cycle theory and the equilibrium theory, which holds that economic forces tend to balance one another rather than simply reflect cyclical trends. Both Hicks and Arrow demonstrated that active forces, not passive ones, strike economic balances when the forces cancel each other out. Their theories were used widely by public and private interests to determine foreign trade, investment policies, and prices.