"We must give the system sufficient factors of stability to enable it to work; but we must not assume that these forces are so powerful as to prevent the system from being liable to fluctuations. There must be a tendency to rigidity of certain prices, particularly wage-rates; but there must also be a tendency to rigidity of certain price-expectations as well, in order to provide an explanation for the rigidity of these prices... Indeed we should do better to assume a good deal of variation in different people’s elasticities of expectations... Of course the way in which a population is divided with respect to this sort of sensitivity will vary very much in different circumstances... We have to be prepared to deal with a range of possible cases, varying from that of a settled community, which has been accustomed to steady conditions in the past (and which, for that reason, is not easily disturbed in the present), to that of a community which has been exposed to violent disturbances of prices (and which may have to be regarded, in consequence, as being economically neurotic."
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Economists from EnglandUniversity of Oxford facultyUniversity of Oxford alumniNobel laureates in EconomicsNobel laureates from England
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John Hicks
Sir John Richard Hicks (8 April 1904 – 20 May 1989) was a British economist, and economy professor at the and later the University of Oxford, who in 1972 received the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences (jointly with Kenneth Arrow) for his pioneering contributions to general equilibrium theory and welfare theory.
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