Talk:John Hicks

Autobiography

I suggest linking his autobiography to the Nobel Prize website (http://nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/economics/laureates/1972/hicks-autobio.html) instead. The current link's content was from it, anyway.

Religious Inclusivist

The first sentence of the article is "Sir John Richard Hicks (April 8, 1904 – May 20, 1989) was one of the most important and influential economists and Religious Inclusivists of the twentieth century."

I have no idea what's up with the "Religious Inclusivists" bit--it's unreferenced, and I doubt that even if it's true it belongs in the lead. Anyway, I'm pulling it out, in case anyone who knows more about it wants source it. CRETOG8(t/c) 04:19, 20 October 2008 (UTC)

The new & unregistered editor in question doubtless confused John Hicks with the singular religious pluralist John Hick. --Thomasmeeks (talk) 19:24, 20 October 2008 (UTC)

Ah! Thanks, at least it makes sense now. CRETOG8(t/c) 20:17, 20 October 2008 (UTC)

Name change from John Hicks to John R. Hicks (economist) or Sir John R. Hicks

I propose moving this article to either "John R. Hicks (economist)" or "Sir John R. Hicks" and redirecting "John Hicks" to "John Hicks (disambiguation)".

There are two primary reasons why "John Hicks" should not be the title of this article:

• "John R. Hicks" is the name usually used to refer to the distinguished professor.
• "John Hicks (jazz pianist)" is comparable in notability as Sir John.

I present the following Google Search results to support this proposal:

Search terms	Result count
"john hicks" economist OR nobel	153,000
"john r hicks" economist OR nobel	517,000
"john richard hicks" economist OR nobel	141,000
"john hicks" jazz	608,000

Sir John is referred to as "Sir" because he was a British knight, a honorary title that apparently carries some prestige in the U.K. I am not familiar enough with Wikipedia style to know if we should include "Sir" in the title. Anyone?

Thanks.

Frappyjohn (talk) 01:14, 16 April 2011 (UTC)

Mr Keynes and the Classics

I worked in a wikilink to my new article of ‘Mr Keynes and the Classics’. I also changed the account of Hicks’s later retraction in ‘IS-LM – an explanation’. I’m pretty sure that the previous summary was wrong: Hicks’s argument was nothing to do with uncertainty, which only gets a mention near the end because of its role in Keynes’s liquidity preference theory.

I think the operative part of Hicks’s paper is the para:

One could construct a model in which... the price... of finished products was flexible... It is possible that Keynes sometimes thought in terms of that sort of model... ; but it cannot be this which IS-LM is supposed to represent. For Y is taken there to be an index not only of employment, but also of output, so the prices of products also are supposed to be fixed in terms of the standard...

The simultaneous identification of Y with employment and output is on p247 of the General Theory. So 44 years after its publication Hicks discovers that it rests on an assumption of fixed commodity prices.

It was Kahn who criticised Hicks for not taking sufficient account of uncertainty. He welcomed the retraction Hicks published in ‘IS-LM – an explanation’ (see p248 of ‘The making of the General Theory’) but I think he fell into a trap because Hicks was implicitly rejecting Keynesianism. He didn’t say that Keynes was right but needed to be interpreted differently; he said that Keynes’s economic system only made sense on an assumption of rigid prices which cannot be accommodated over any reasonable timeframe. And he had never been more than a half-hearted Keynesian in the first place, rejecting Keynes’s theory of the trade cycle and (probably) of effective demand, so he was throwing away the only part he’d ever accepted. Colin.champion (talk) 09:10, 22 March 2018 (UTC)

Instead of the link to the ‘Library of Economics and Liberty’ I provided one for the HET website. Colin.champion (talk) 13:57, 2 April 2018 (UTC)