Francis Ysidro Edgeworth
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Brief biography
Francis Ysidro Edgeworth (February 8, 1845 - February 13, 1926) was an Irish polymath who studied at Trinity College, Dublin before obtaining a scholarship to Balliol College, Oxford where he subsequently became a professor. A deep thinker, his contributions were far ahead of his time.
Edgeworth was a highly influential figure in the development of neo-classical economics. He was the first to apply certain formal mathematical techniques to individual decision making in economics. He developed utility theory introducing the indifference curve and the famous Edgeworth box which is now familiar to undergraduates of microeconomics. He is also known for the Edgeworth conjecture which states that the core of an economy shrinks to the set of competitive equilibria as the number of agents in the economy gets large. The high degree of originality demonstrated in his most important book on economics, Mathematical Psychics, was matched only by the difficulty of reading it. He frequently referenced literary sources and interspersed the writing with passages in a number of languages, including as Latin, French and Ancient Greek.
One of the most influential economists of the time, Alfred Marshall, commented in his review of Mathematical Psychics[link]:
- This book shows clear signs of genius, and is a promise of great things to come... His readers may sometimes wish that he had kept his work by him a little longer till he had worked it out a little more fully, and obtained that simplicity which comes only through long labour. But taking it as what it claims to be, 'a tentative study', we can only admire its brilliancy, force, and originality.
- Whatever else readers of this book may think about it, they would probably all agree that it is a very remarkable one... There can be no doubt that in the style of his composition Mr. Edgeworth does not do justice to his matter. His style, if not obscure, is implicit, so that the reader is left to puzzle out every important sentence like an enigma.
As a self-taught mathematical statistician he is remembered by the eponymous Edgeworth series. He wrote the article on Probability in the 1911 edition of the Encyclopædia Britannica. In 1928 A. L. Bowley published a book F. Y. Edgeworth's Contributions to Mathematical Statistics.
He was also a barrister, and held the Tooke chair of Economic Science at King's College, London and later the Drummond Chair of Political Economy at Oxford.
Main works
- "Women's Wages in Relation to Economic Welfare"
- "The Theory of Distribution"
- "The Theory of International Values," Part One, Part Two, Part Three, Economic Journal, Volume 4 (1894)
- Mathematical Psychics (1881)
Contributions to economics
In Mathematical Psychics (1881), his most famous and original book, he criticized Jevons's theory of barter exchange, showing that under a system of "recontracting" there will be, in fact, many solutions, an "indeterminacy of contract". Edgeworth's "range of final settlements" was later resurrected by Martin Shubik (1959) as the game-theoretic concept of "the core". (http://cepa.newschool.edu/het/profiles/edgew.htm)
- Edgeworth's conjecture
- International trade
- Taxation paradox
He set the utilitarian foundations for highly progressive taxation, arguing that the optimal distribution of taxes should be such that 'the marginal disutility incurred by each taxpayer should be the same' (Edgeworth, 1897).
- Monopoly pricing
- Marginal productivity theory
Though Edgeworth's ideas were original and in depth, his way to express them was not understandable to most of his contemporaries. Being well trained in languages and the classics, his words were long, intricate and erudite, not to mention of numerous obscure classical and literary references with them.
References
- P J FitzPatrick, Leading British statisticians of the nineteenth century, Journal of the American Statistical Association 55 (1960), 38-70.
- M G Kendall, Francis Ysidro Edgeworth, 1845-1926, Biometrika 55 (1968), 269-275.
- Spiegel, Henry William. The Growth of Economic Thought. Ed. Durham & London. Duke University Press, 1991.
External links
- John J. O'Connor and Edmund F. Robertson. [] at the MacTutor History of Mathematics archive.
- [New School: Francis Ysidro Edgeworth]
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