The Theory of Wages.

HICKS, J.R. [John].

$12,500.00

Item Number: 100560

London: Macmillan & Company, 1932.

First edition of this classic microeconomic statement of wage determination in competitive markets and major contribution to economic theory. Octavo, original cloth. Association copy, inscribed by the author to the British economist Lionel Charles Robbins, head of economics at the London School of Economics on the front free endpaper, “Lionel Robbins without whom how little of this book could have been written! In deep gratitude, JRH.” It would be hard to exaggerate the influence of Lionel Robbins and that of the wider “Robbins circle” at the LSE during 1930s on the development of John Hicks into one of leading pure economic theorists of the twentieth century. Hicks credited Robbins with initiating his interest in economic theory, stating in his ‘Commentary’ in the 1963 edition of The Theory of Wages that “… he moved me from Cassel to Walras and Pareto, to Edgeworth and Taussig to Wicksell and the Austrians – with all of whom I was more at home at that stage than I was with Marshall and Pigou” (p. 306). Although Hicks left for Cambridge in 1935, he would later tell Robbins “that his years at LSE were ‘the formative years of my life as an economist; I do not think I have had as important years since’” (quoted in Howson, p. 252). The Theory of Wages was “ostensibly a book about labour economics but some of its elements, such as the ‘elasticity of substitution’ and its connection with the relative income shares of labor and capital, proved to have a much wider application to the general theory of distribution” (Blaug). Robbins played a key role in bringing the work to print, writing a “strong recommendation for publication to Macmillan, which agreed to publish it but only after a report from a second reader (D.H. Robertson) after an unenthusiastic one from Keynes” (Howson, p. 167). Writing in his Autobiography of an Economist, Robbins would describe the book as “bursting with ideas which, if they have not all proved to be ultimately defensible, were certainly novel” (p. 129). In near fine condition. An exceptional association on this landmark work, which anticipates a number of developments in distribution and growth theory and remains a standard work in labour economics.