J. R. Hicks on the Economics of Population

Sir John Hicks (1904–89), professor of political economy at Oxford University from 1952 to 1965, was one of the foremost economists of his time, making notable contributions to the theory of wages, general equilibrium theory, and welfare economics. He received (jointly with Kenneth Arrow) the 1972 Nobel prize in economics. Value and Capital (1939), his best-known book, is held as a classic; his 1937 exegesis of Keynes's General Theory has long been a staple of undergraduate economics. Population does not figure appreciably in his writings, although an almost offhand footnote attached to the concluding paragraph of Value and Capital suggests that it could have: “[0]ne cannot repress the thought that perhaps the whole Industrial Revolution of the last two hundred years has been nothing else but a vast secular boom, largely induced by the unparalleled rise in population.” (He added: “If this is so, it would help to explain why, as the wisest hold, it has been such a disappointing episode in human history.”) In his late work, A Theory of Economic History (1969), however, the principal driving force in economic development is depicted as the expansion of markets. A sustained discussion of the topic of population by Hicks is contained in one of his earlier books. The Social Framework: An Introduction to Economics (Oxford University Press, 1942). Chapters 4 and 5 of this book treat “Population and Its History” and “The Economics of Population”; one of the appendixes is “On the Idea of an Optimum Population.” Chapter 5 and this appendix are reprinted below. The Social Framework was written as an introductory text, although its lucid style characterized all of Hicks's work. It covered both theory and applications with particular attention to the then novel subject of national accounting. Hicks described the book as “economic anatomy” in contrast to the “economic physiology” of how the economy works. Chapter 5 gives equal attention to under- and overpopulation, both seen as posing dangers. The Preface to the 1971 (fourth) edition of The Social Framework notes that the population and labor force chapters “have been rather substantially altered—to take account of the curious things that have happened in these fields (which one might have expected to be slow moving).” In 1971 he is more cautious than in 1942 about suggesting that slowing population growth might have been a factor in the 1930s depression, and readier to admit of countries where “a continuing rise in population, even while there is some continuing agricultural improvement, is likely to lead in the end to unemployment and destitution.” The appendix on optimum population was retained through all editions.