Pigou, Clapham and Sraffa: Wealth, Welfare and Cost Controversies

A.C. Pigou was born in Ryde on the Isle of Wight, in 1877. He was Head of School at Harrow, one of the great English public schools, won a scholarship for study at King’s College, Cambridge, and subsequently gained first class honours, first in the History, and then in Part II of the Moral Sciences Tripos, which included much economics. He commenced teaching and writing economics not long thereafter and in 1908 succeeded Marshall as Professor of Economics, a position he held until 1943. During the First World War, Pigou avoided active military service as a conscientious objector, working as part of a team of ambulance drivers near the front during the long summer vacations. His war time experiences probably turned him into the recluse he became from the early 1920s. As he grew older, Pigou became the type of eccentric academic about whom legends are made and anecdotes abound. He was notoriously shy of the opposite sex as illustrated by his writing practice. He dictated his books from one of his college rooms, door half closed, to a stenographer in another room and expected her to return the finished product via the college mail service. Pigou was a good teacher. ‘An attractive presence; complete clarity; great precision of thought and definition; a little, but not too much, geometry and algebra on the blackboard; an occasional joke to illustrate a proposition, never a note’, was Dalton’s (a later Chancellor of the Exchequer) impression of him in the classroom.