Arthur Cecil Pigou

Quotes

• “Though a skilled mathematician, Alfred Marshall used mathematics sparingly. He saw that excessive reliance on this instrument might lead us astray in pursuit of intellectual toys, imaginary problems not conforming to the conditions of real life: and further, might distort our sense of proportion by causing us to neglect factors that could not easily be worked up in the mathematical machine.”
• “Prosperity ends in a crisis. The era of optimism dies in the crisis, but in dying it gives birth to an era of pessimism. This new era is born, not an infant, but a giant; for an industrial boom has necessarily been a period of strong emotional excitement, and an excited man passes from one form of excitement to another more rapidly than he passes to quiescence. Under the new error, business is unduly depressed.”
• “One who desired knowledge of man apart from the fruits of knowledge would seek it in the history of religious enthusiasm, of martyrdom, or of love; he would not seek it in the market-place. When we elect to watch the play of human motives that are ordinary — that are sometimes mean and dismal and ignoble — our impulse is not the philosopher's impulse, knowledge for the sake of knowledge, but rather the physiologist's, knowledge for the healing that knowledge may help to bring.”
• “Wonder, Carlyle declared, is the beginning of philosophy. It is not wonder, but rather the social enthusiasm which revolts from the sordidness of mean streets and the joylessness of withered lives, that is the beginning of economic science. Here, if in no other field, Comte's great phrase holds good: "It is for the heart to suggest our problems; it is for the intellect to solve them.... The only position for which the intellect is primarily adapted is to be the servant of the social sympathies."”
• “It is not pretended that, at the present stage of its development, economic science is able to provide an organon even remotely approaching to what it imagines for itself as its ideal.”

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Key facts

Born

( 1877-11-18 ) 18 November 1877, Ryde , Isle of Wight , England

Died

7 March 1959 (1959-03-07) (aged 81), Cambridge , Cambridgeshire , England

Alma mater

King's College, Cambridge

Influences

Alfred Marshall , Henry Sidgwick

Discipline

Welfare economics

School or tradition

Neoclassical economics

Institutions

University of Cambridge

Notable ideas

Externalities , Pigou effect , Pigouvian tax

Awards

1899 Chancellor's Gold Medal , 1903 Adam Smith Prize

via Wikipedia infobox

Key dates

Born

18 November 1878

Died

7 March 1959

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Wikidata facts

Instance of

human

Gender

male

Citizenship

United Kingdom

Place of birth

Ryde

Place of death

Cambridge

Occupation

university teacher

Educated at

Harrow School

Employer

University of Cambridge

Languages spoken

English language

Doctoral advisor

Alfred Marshall

Student of

Alfred Marshall

Field of work

economics

Image

A.C. Pigou.jpg

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