Sir
Robert Giffen is a famous Scottish economist, writer of finance and
statistician born in 1837. He was
educated in at a local village school. In his early days, his brother and himself
wrote articles and poems for the local newspaper. Giffen is most well known for the economic phenomenon
the Giffen Good. Giffen Good. A good where higher price causes an increase in
demand, the increase in demand is due to the income effect of the higher price
outweighing the substitution effect. In the real world, it is very rare that
the situation will occur but it has happened before during the 1845-1851 Irish
Potato Famine.
Sir
Giffen’s gained his reputation mainly on his work in “official statistics”
Giffen’s reputation rests mainly on his work in “official statistics,” a field
which had been pioneered by G. R. Porter. Giffen was largely responsible for
the first attempts to collect figures relating to the wages of manual laborers
and for setting up the Bureau of Labour Statistics. Giffen was also among the
earliest to analyze the workings of the quantity theory of money, and the role
played by the rate of interest, within an economy possessing a banking system.
Sir
Robert Giffen had a substantial influence in Economics and Finance in Great
Britain. During his life he was the Head of the Statistics Department for the
Board of Trade, President of the Royal Statistical Society, and an elected
member of the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences. He was assistant editor for
the popular magazine The Economist. He published extensively regarding several
topics in economics and public finance including Essays on Finance 1879 &
1884 and The Growth of Capital 1890. He was also knighted under the Order
of the Bath.
I did not know about sir Robert Giffen prior to this class but I have the upmost respect for his because of his resume. He has been amongst one of the influence economists that have helped a better understanding of the economic system.
I did not know about sir Robert Giffen prior to this class but I have the upmost respect for his because of his resume. He has been amongst one of the influence economists that have helped a better understanding of the economic system.
http://www.bloomsbury.com/us/the-collected-works-of-robert-giffen-9781855063761/
http://www.nytimes.com/2014/05/02/business/as-investors-search-for-yield-credit-standards-decline.html?_r=0
http://www.nytimes.com/2014/05/02/business/as-investors-search-for-yield-credit-standards-decline.html?_r=0
I'm surprised that you hadn't heard of Giffen before. The Giffen good is commonly taught in intermediate microeconomics (at least when I used to teach it) because it illustrates the logical possibility that a demand curve can slope up, though that only happens under the most dire of circumstances.
ReplyDeleteOn a technical note, let me observe that there is a link tool in the Blogger editor, so the links you gave at the end of your post could have been made into live links that can be clicked on. That makes things easier for the reader (me in this case) to track down the references.