Skip to main content

Robert Giffen


Robert Giffen was an economist and statistician. He was born in Scotland in 1837 in the town of Strathaven and educated at a small village school. At a young age, he showed at interest in journalism and law. His experiences at the Stirling Journal led him to move to London and take a job at the Globe in 1862. Four years later he went on to take a job at the The Economist as an assistant. His writing was mainly focused on economic and financial subjects including economic growth, national product and more. [1]

This experience as a journalist paved the path for his work involving the interpretation of economic statistics. His contributions led to his membership in the Royal Statistical Society serving as an editor and president and receiving awards. [2]

Robert Giffen continued in later years to take a leading part in all public controversies connected with finance and taxation. Perhaps his greatest contribution is the concept of giffen goods. Giffen goods are named after him and Alfred Marshall credited him with the idea in his book the Principles of Economics. Giffen first proposed the renown paradox from his observations of the purchasing habits of the Victorian Era poor. [2]

Prior to writing about this, I knew about Giffen Goods since it is such a prevalent topic in many economics classes. However, I did not know what experiences to the proposal of the paradox. 

[1] http://policonomics.com/robert-giffen/
[2] http://www.encyclopedia.com/social-sciences/applied-and-social-sciences-magazines/giffen-robert

Comments

  1. Professor ArvanSeptember 9, 2017 at 6:32 AM

    The particular experience that motivated the idea of a Giffen good was the Irish Potato Famine, which caused many deaths and a large out-migrations, many to America. Potatoes were a staple of the diet in Ireland and when the crop failed, as the saying goes, people were so poor that all they could demand was potatoes.

    ReplyDelete

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Triangle Model

I have experienced the triangle model in one of my organizations for the last two years as part of a consulting RSO on campus. In this model, my team and I are the agent while the two principals are the RSO and our client. Consultants have the opportunity to explore various areas of business development and digital design. Our teams work closely with clientele to understand problems and formulate solutions that will best fit their business needs. Our RSO is dedicated to developing and offering the best solutions to our clients for their business needs. To consult new ventures, an organization must understand today’s principles of startup development and the life cycle of a modern start up. Well established or new to the game, our RSO tends to approaches each client with a fresh, innovative mindset. We are creatives and business specialists alike. On a weekly basis, it is our job as consultants to decide on what direction to take our research, conduct that research, and then me...
4 comments
Read more

Final Post

Overall, I really enjoyed this class. I genuinely liked to hear the Professor speak about all of his different positions because he has had so many very interesting and unique experiences.   I think this class was quite different than most of the 400 level courses have taken thus far. It was different not only in terms of the class structure but content as well. As far as the class structure goes, I really did like it. I think that the blog posts actually ended up helping me learn a lot. Not only did it allow me to reflect upon how important my experiences have been thus far but it showed me things from an economic lens which I would have never considered otherwise. I think that my blog posts got significantly better as the course progressed. I had been taking mostly science classes in college. I had just finished my prerequisites for medical school last semester, so I had not done a lot of writing for a few years. This semester, most of my classes required blogs/essays, so I ha...
4 comments
Read more

Conflicts in an RSO

In one of my previous posts I discussed my involvement in an RSO on campus. Our organization is structured with the executive board on top, general board members under the executive board, and then our general members. As many of the members of our board do not have too much “real- world” experience dealing with conflict in the work force, people don’t always know the best way to handle it. The beginning of this conflict started when “S” joined our RSO. She joined my junior year and I had advocated for her to the rest of the executive board members because I knew she was bright, a hard worker, and full of new ideas. My enthusiasm paid off and she was selected to join the general board consisting of 20 members. The year that S had joined was a very competitive year. We had only a few spots open for new board members and many qualified applicants. This made S even more enthusiastic when she joined and right off the bat she became one of our more vocal board members. All of the b...
4 comments
Read more