Abstract
Richard Stone is recognised as the father of national accounting, having pioneered the United Nations’ System of National Accounts and been awarded the Nobel Prize in Economics in 1984 for this work. His specific contribution to Cambridge economics came from his time as the first Director of the Department of Applied Economics (DAE) and his subsequent time as Director of the Cambridge Growth Project in the DAE. His influence can be seen in three areas that flourished in Cambridge: historical research into UK national income statistics; the development of econometrics as a discipline, including input–output analysis and the Linear Expenditure System explaining private consumer demand; and the modelling work that provided a distinct econometric application of Keynesian economics.
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Notes
- 1.
Cambridge Econometrics is a successor company to one founded in 1976 by members of the CGP to provide a commercial service based on the application of the Project’s economic model. It is now owned by the Cambridge Trust for New Thinking in Economics, founded in 2005; see www.camecon.com.
- 2.
- 3.
All references to Stone’s work are shown in square brackets, for example, as [1], where the number, here 1, refers to the chronological list in Pesaran (1991: 112–123).
- 4.
Keynes to Kittredge, Rockefeller Foundation, New York, 1 May 1942, E.A.G. Robinson Papers, Marshall Library, Cambridge University: Box 36.
- 5.
Willits to Keynes, Rockefeller Foundation, New York, 18 June 1942, E.A.G. Robinson Papers, Marshall Library, Cambridge University: Box 36.
- 6.
Richard Stone Papers, King’s College Archive Centre, Cambridge University: Box JRNS 4/11.
- 7.
Stone was a founding member of the Council of the IARIW and the first Chairman, 1949–1951 (see Carson 1999).
- 8.
Staff in the DAE during Stone’s tenure as Director included Sydney Afriat, Mike Farrell, T.W. Anderson, J.S. Cramer, Phyllis Deane, James Duesenberry, Roy Geary, Alan Prest, Richard Brumberg, Sig Prais, Hendrik Houthakker, James Durbin, Geoff Watson, Don Cochrane, and Guy Orcutt.
- 9.
Visitors included James Tobin, T.W. Anderson, Larry Klein, Wassily Leontief, Tjalling Koopmans, Ragnar Frisch, Gerhard Tintner, and Geoff Watson (of Durbin–Watson fame), an Australian writing a thesis as a student of the University of North Carolina.
- 10.
Geoff Watson remembers: ‘There were no departmental boundaries where I was concerned, but the joke used to be that this was an applied economics group. We weren’t allowed in the door of Economics. All the economists were anti-mathematical. They believed you had to do it with words, which was bloody hard. You have to be very clever to say all these things, for example marginal utilities—quite hard to define in words but mathematically trivial. In fact, the economists thought that Richard Stone was so subversive they made this little extra Department to keep him out of theirs. There were two or three people in Stone’s group who subsequently got Nobel Prizes and every one of the first 15 Nobel Prize winners in economics visited Applied Economics’ (Watson quoted in Beran and Fisher 1998: 77).
- 11.
Alan Prest was Lecturer in the Faculty and Fellow of Christ’s College after joining the Faculty in 1945 as a founding researcher in the DAE. His brother Wilfred Prest, visiting him in 1953, wrote in a memorandum: ‘I was rather shocked to find the Faculty there deeply divided on doctrinal, political and, indeed, racial grounds. On the one hand there is the Robertson party comprising, in addition to Sir Dennis himself such diverse characters as Guillebaud, Richard Stone, R.F. Henderson and S.R. Dennison. This group has never quite accepted Keynes without reservation and its members are inclined to be conservative, politically and socially. On the other hand, there is the Kahn party comprising, in addition to Professor Kahn, Sraffa, Kaldor, Dobb, Rostas, Joan Robinson, Ruth Cohen and Harry Johnson. This group is neo-keynesian [sic] in outlook and is well to the left politically … The conflict between the two parties is deep and bitter’ (report of visit to Britain, January–March 1953, Wilfred Prest Papers, University of Melbourne Archives, quoted in http://www.vu.edu.au/sites/default/files/cses/pdfs/millmow-paper.pdf: 3).
- 12.
Note by Stone dated 13 June 1945, in the E.A.G. Robinson Papers, Marshall Library, Cambridge University: Box 36.
- 13.
See Kaldor (1944).
- 14.
Johansen can be considered as the first to have developed a general equilibrium model in his PhD thesis partly written whilst he was visiting Cambridge in 1959.
- 15.
See for example the work of the Brookings Institution reported in Duesenberry et al. (1965).
- 16.
See Pesaran (1991: 99–101) for Stone’s own account of the work.
- 17.
The 4CMR was formed after the DAE was merged into the Faculty of Economics in 2005 and those working on energy–environment–economy modelling moved to the Department of Land Economy.
- 18.
Stone to Tinbergen, 12 February 1981, Richard Stone Papers, King’s College Archive Centre, Cambridge University: Box JRNS 4/10.
References
Richard Stone’s Publications Most Relevant to Cambridge Economics
The numbers, as in [18] immediately below, refer to those in the list in Pesaran (1991: 112–123).
Stone, J.R.N. (1946). ‘John Maynard Keynes (obituary)’. 17 July. Economisch-Statische Berichten (Amsterdam): 1,523. [18]
Stone, J.R.N. and A. Brown (1962). ‘A Long-Term Growth Model for the British Economy’. Paper presented at the IARIW Conference, Tutzing, 1961. Chapter 9 in R.C. Geary (ed.) Europe’s Future in Figures. Amsterdam: North Holland: 287–310. [80]
Stone, J.R.N. (1980). ‘Keynes, Political Arithmetic and Econometrics’. Proceedings of the British Academy, 64: 55–92 and separately. [167]
Stone, J.R.N. (1980). ‘Political Economy, Economics and Beyond’. Economic Journal, 90(360): 719–736. [179]
Stone, J.R.N. (1984). ‘An Autobiographical Sketch’. Les Prix Nobel 1984. Stockholm: Almquist and Wicksell International. Available at: http://www.nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/economic-sciences/laureates/1984/stone-bio.html. [192]
Bibliography of References Discussing Richard Stone and His Work
Bacharach, M. (1970). Biproportional Matrices and Input-Output Change. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Baranzini, M. and G.D. Marangoni (2015). ‘Richard Stone: An Annotated Bibliography’. Available at: http://doc.rero.ch/record/235834/files/Stone-Annotated-Bibliography-03-2015.pdf.
Barker, T. (1977). ‘Making the Cambridge Growth Project Model Dynamic’. Chapter 4 in W.F. Gossling (ed.) Medium-Term Dynamic Forecasting. London: Input-Output Publishing Company: 96–109.
Barker, T. and D. Crawford-Brown (2015). Decarbonising the World’s Economy. London: Imperial College Press.
Beran, R.J. and N.I. Fisher (1998). ‘A Conversation with Geoff Watson’. Statistical Science, 13(1): 75–93.
Carson, C.S. (1999). ‘50-Year Retrospective of the IARIW: The Early Years’. Review of Income and Wealth, 45(3): 380–382.
Deaton, A. (1987). ‘Stone, Richard John Nicholas’. In J. Eatwell, M. Milgate and P. Newman (eds) The New Palgrave: A Dictionary of Economics. Volume 4. London: Macmillan: London: 509–512.
Deaton, A. (1993). ‘John Richard Nicholas Stone, 1913–1991’. Proceedings of the British Academy, 82: 475–492.
Duesenberry, J.S., G. Fromm, L.R. Klein and E. Kuh (eds) (1965). The Brookings Quarterly Econometric Model of the United States. Chicago: Rand McNally.
Garfield, E. (1985). Essays of an Information Scientist. Volume 8. Philadelphia: Institute for Scientific Information: 469–479.
Goodwin, R.M. (1995). ‘In Memory of Sir Richard Stone’. Introduction to E. Giovannini (ed) Social Statistics, National Accounts and Economic Analysis: International Conference in Memory of Sir Richard Stone. Annali di Statistica, X, volume 6. Rome: Istituto Nazionale di Statistica: 17–20. Available at: http://lipari.istat.it/digibib/Annali/TO00175363_Serie10Vol06Ed1995.pdf.
Johansen, L. (1985) ‘Richard Stone’s Contributions to Economics’. Scandinavian Journal of Economics, 87(1): 4–32.
Kaldor, N. (1944). ‘The Quantitative Aspects of the Full Employment Problem in Britain’. Appendix in W.H. Beveridge, Full Employment in a Free Society. London: George Allen and Unwin: 344–401.
Marangoni, G. and D. Rossignoli (2014) ‘Richard Stone’s Contributions to Input-Output Analysis’. Paper number 295. Available at: https://www.iioa.org/conferences/22nd/papers.html.
Pasinetti, L.L. (1992). ‘Professor Sir Richard Stone (1913–1991)’. Caian: The Annual Record of Gonville & Caius College, Cambridge: 112–118.
Pesaran, M.H. (1991). ‘The ET Interview: Professor Sir Richard Stone’. Economic Theory, 7(1): 85–123.
Pesaran, M.H. and G.C. Harcourt (2000). ‘Life and Work of John Richard Nicholas Stone 1913–1991’. Economic Journal, 110(461): 146–165.
Pesaran, M.H. and R.P. Smith (1985). ‘Keynes on Econometrics’. Chapter 8 in T. Lawson and M.H. Pesaran (eds) Keynes’ Economics: Methodological Issues. London: Croom Helm: 134–150.
Pyatt, G. (1992). ‘In Memoriam, Sir Richard Stone, KT, CBE, ScD, FBA (1913–1991)’. Review of Income and Wealth, 38(2): 245–248.
Smith, R.P. (1998). ‘The Development of Econometric Methods at the DAE’. Chapter 5 in I. Begg and S.G.B. Henry (eds) Applied Economics and Public Policy. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press: 88–104.
Ward, M. (2004). Quantifying the World: UN Ideas and Statistics. Indiana: Indiana University Press.
Weale, M. (2004). ‘Stone, Sir (John) Richard Nicholas (1913–1991)’. Oxford Dictionary of National Biography. Available at: http://www.oxforddnb.com/view/article/49989.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Corresponding author
Editor information
Editors and Affiliations
Copyright information
© 2017 The Author(s)
About this chapter
Cite this chapter
Barker, T. (2017). Richard Stone (1913–1991). In: Cord, R. (eds) The Palgrave Companion to Cambridge Economics. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-41233-1_37
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-41233-1_37
Published:
Publisher Name: Palgrave Macmillan, London
Print ISBN: 978-1-137-41232-4
Online ISBN: 978-1-137-41233-1
eBook Packages: Economics and FinanceEconomics and Finance (R0)