Hicks, Sir John (1904-1989), was a British economist and taxation expert who won the 1972 Nobel Prize for economic science. Hicks often worked with his wife, Lady Ursula Hicks, who was also a leading economist.
Hicks shared the Nobel Prize with American economist Kenneth Joseph Arrow for their contributions to general equilibrium theory and welfare economics (see Arrow, Kenneth Joseph ). General equilibrium theory examines the balanced relationship between the processes of production, distribution, and consumption in a nation’s economic system. Welfare economics refers to a branch of economics concerned with achieving the greatest possible well-being for a nation’s people.
John Richard Hicks was born in Warwick, England. He attended Clifton College and studied mathematics, philosophy, politics, and economics at Oxford University’s Balliol College. He received a bachelor’s degree from Oxford in 1927. Meanwhile, he began working as a lecturer at the London School of Economics in 1926, a job he held until 1935. He taught at Cambridge from 1935 to 1938 and at the University of Manchester from 1938 to 1946.
In 1946, he returned to Oxford as a fellow of Nuffield College. From 1952 to 1965, he was a professor of political economy at Oxford. He also became a fellow of All Souls College in 1952. He served briefly on the Royal Commission on the Taxation of Profits and Income.
Hicks’s best-known books include Value and Capital (1939), The Problem of Budgetary Reform (1948), A Contribution to the Theory of the Trade Cycle (1950), and A Revision of Demand Theory (1956). Queen Elizabeth II knighted him in 1964, making him Sir John Hicks.
