Arthur Cecil Pigou

Arthur Cecil Pigou (; 18 November 1877 – 7 March 1959) was an English economist. As a teacher and builder of the School of Economics at the University of Cambridge, he trained and influenced many Cambridge economists who went on to take chairs of economics around the world. His work covered various fields of economics, particularly welfare economics, but also included Business cycle theory, unemployment, public finance, index numbers, and measurement of national output. His reputation was affected adversely by influential economic writers who used his work as the basis on which to define their own opposing views. He reluctantly served on several public committees, including the Cunliffe Committee and the 1919 Royal Commission on Income tax. Early life and education Pigou was born at Ryde on the Isle of Wight, the son of Clarence George Scott Pigou, an army officer, and his wife Nora Biddel Frances Sophia, daughter of Sir John Lees, 3rd Baronet. He won a scholarship to Harrow School, where he was in Newlands house and became the first modern head of school. The school's economics society is named The Pigou Society in his honour. In 1896 he was admitted as a history scholar to King's College, Cambridge, where he first read history under Oscar Browning. He won the Chancellor's Gold Medal for English Verse in 1899, and the Cobden (1901), Burney (1901), and Adam Smith Prizes (1903), and made his mark in the Cambridge Union Society, of which he was President in 1900. He came to economics through the study of philosophy and ethics under the Moral Science Tripos. He studied economics under Alfred Marshall, whom he later succeeded as professor of political economy. His first and unsuccessful attempt at a fellowship of King's was a thesis on "Browning as a Religious Teacher". Academic work Pigou began lecturing on economics in 1901 and started giving the course on advanced economics to second year students on which was based the education of many Cambridge economists over the next thirty years. In his early days he lectured on a variety of subjects outside economics. He became a Fellow of King's College on his second attempt in March 1902, and was appointed Girdler's Lecturer in the summer of 1904. He devoted himself to exploring the various departments of economic doctrine, and as a result published the works on which his worldwide reputation rests. He specifically studied under Alfred Marshall and focused on normative economics.