ARTHUR CECIL PIGOU

Ian Kumekawa, The First Serious Optimist: A. C. Pigou and the Birth of Welfare Economics (Princeton & Oxford: Princeton U. Press, 2017) (Pigou was [Alfred] Marshall's student at a decisive moment, one at which Marshall was casting about for young disciples to become integrally involved in his new program. The result was that Pigou was personally plucked from the study of history and mentored by the greatest economist then working in Britain. His early connection with Marshall afforded him the imprimatur of the leader of British economists and enabled him to participate in the genesis of a new orthodoxy. Yet unlike colleagues just a few years younger, Pigou was not educated exclusively as an economist. Instead, he was one of the last--perhaps the last--important economic thinker in Britain to come up under the old system in which politics, history, and moral science mingled with economic theory. Pigou's early economics, then, were almost unique in that they bore the clear marks of two systems. Though works o abstract theory, they took history, politics, and morality very seriously. And though forged in the crucible of a new science, they were clearly imbued with and inspired by ethical impulses." Id. at 33.).