A.C. Pigou (1877-1959)

Karen Knight and Michael McLure

Introduction

David Collard (1981: 132) has described Arthur Cecil Pigou as elusive, partly because he was ‘caught between the shadow of Marshall and the pyrotechnics of Keynes’. Other factors that contributed to this elusive standing include a lifelong discipline of keeping his professional and personal life distinctly separate; personal traits that, as Saltmarsh and Wilkinson (I960: 16-17) have recalled, revealed a great shyness towards casual acquaintances (particularly with regard to women); and a tendency to be ‘brusque when privacy was invaded without warning’ (ibid.). But, notwithstanding these elusive qualities, Pigou’s scholarly achievements place him in the first rank of economists from the Cambridge School. His international reputation for major contributions to the economics of welfare, unemployment, money, business cycles and consumer demand was substantial by any standard, and, within

The authors would like to thank Geoff Harcourt and Robert Leeson for their comments on a draft of this chapter.

K. Knight (h)

Researcher in Economics, Australia e-mail: This email address is being protected from spam bots, you need Javascript enabled to view it

M. McLure (h)

Professor of Economics, Business School, University of Western Australia, Australia e-mail: This email address is being protected from spam bots, you need Javascript enabled to view it

R.A. Cord (ed.), The Palgrave Companion to Cambridge Economics,

DOI 10.1057/978-1-137-41233-1_20

the limits that his personality would provide for, ‘the Prof’, as Pigou was widely known, was conscientious in his efforts to foster the development of Cambridge economics during his tenure as the Cambridge Professor of Political Economy.

Pigou was born at Ryde on the Isle of Wight in 1877 and died at Cambridge in 1959. He was the eldest child of Clarence George Scott Pigou, an army officer in the 15th Regiment, and his wife Nora Frances Sophia Pigou (nee Lees), the second eldest daughter of Sir John Lees, the 3rd Baronet of Blackrock.^[1] A.C. Pigou’s brother, Gerard Clarence, was born the following year and his sister, Kathleen Marie, in 1881. Within the extended Pigou family, a tradition had developed from the 1820s whereby the eldest son of the family attended Harrow School and that tradition was followed in Arthur’s case. David Champernowne (1959: 264) has described Pigou as ‘a god among mortals’ at Harrow, where he excelled both academically and in athletics and won the respect of both teachers and peers. Pigou was elected a School Monitor in 1894 and in his final year he was made Head Boy. He left Harrow at the end of 1895 after having won the Clayton Scholarship for Modern Studies, which he used to attend Cambridge University and reside at King’s College.

Champernowne (ibid.) has also recalled Pigou’s ‘refusal to be diverted by any other ambitions’ enabling him ‘to live a completely uncomplicated life’. This uncomplicated life encompassed two lifelong endeavours: his i ntellectual and professional activities at Cambridge, and mountaineering, an activity that was encouraged by his King’s colleague, the economic historian John Clapham, during the first decade of the twentieth century (Austin Robinson 1968). Pigou spent the majority of his life at King’s. When not at King’s, he became a proficient climber, scaling peaks in the Alps and the Lake District where he had a cottage built at Lower Gatesgarth, Buttermere, in 1911.

[1] The Baronetcy of Blackrock in the County of Dublin was created for John Lees, soldier, politician andadministrator, on 30 June 1804, in the Baronetage of the United Kingdom (Lundy 2012).