Stone, John Richard Nicholas (Born 1913)

Abstract

Sir Richard Stone, knighted in 1978 and Nobel Laureate in Economics in 1984, is the outstanding figure in postwar British applied econometrics. His work in social accounting has had a profound influence on the way that measurement is carried out in economics, and his econometric model building has changed the way that economists analyse those measurements. In contrast to most economists of his time, he is a scientist and scholar whose command of methodology and theory has always been at the command of the interpretation and measurement of the evidence. He is the inheritor of the British empiricist tradition in economics that saw its first flowering among the ‘political arithmeticians’ of the English Restoration, men such as William Petty, Gregory King and Charles Davenant. To a large extent, he has abstained from the short-term policy advice that many of his contemporaries were so anxious to proffer, preferring to concentrate on the advancement of his science. But his contributions have had an incalculable effect on economic policy and his career provides eloquent testimony to the long-run social value of scientific scholarship in economics and a contrast to the unenviable record of those economists who have involved themselves in the day-to-day conduct of British economic policy.KeywordsNational IncomeNational AccountDemand AnalysisSocial Accounting MatrixMarginal PropensityThese keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.