PROF. A. W. KIRKALDY

Abstract

PROF. A. W. KIRKALDY, until recently professor of economics and commerce at University College, Nottingham, and, prior to 1919, professor of finance in the University of Birmingham, who died on Dec. 29, 1931, aged sixty-four years, was one of the few British economists of the generation of teachers, now passing away, who had actual experience of routine business management for he did not enter Wadham College, Oxford, to take up academic studies until he had served in a family business in Sunderland, in many capacities, for several years. It was only natural, therefore, that his work as teacher and as writer should be characterised by a certain impatience with the more abstract school, and by a desire to lay the foundations of economic science more securely on a basis of real fact than on speculation concerning the actions of imaginary business men and on abandoned psychological generalisations.