Richard Lipsey

Richard George Lipsey, OC, FRSC (born August 28, 1928) is a Canadian academic and economist. He is best known for his work on the economics of the second-best, a theory of constrained optimization by government of the tax system, which he co-authored with Kelvin Lancaster, a mathematical economist of high standing.

Background

Born in Victoria, British Columbia, he received a Bachelor of Arts degree in 1951 from the University of British Columbia, a Master of Arts degree in 1953 from the University of Toronto, and a Ph.D. in 1958 from the London School of Economics.

He was at one time married to Assia Wevill.

Career

From 1955 to 1963, he held the positions of Assistant Lecturer, Lecturer, Reader and Professor at the London School of Economics. From 1963 to 1969, he was a Professor of Economics, Chairman of the Economics Department, and Dean of the School of Social Studies at the University of Essex in England. Returning to Canada, he held a brief position as a Visiting Professor at the University of British Columbia, before being appointed the Sir Edward Robert Peacock professor of economics at Queen's University in Kingston, Ontario in 1970. He was the Irving Fisher Visiting Professor at Yale University from 1979 to 1980. From 1983 to 1989, he was a Senior Economic Advisor at the C.D. Howe Institute, the economic and social think tank in Toronto. In 1989, he was appointed Professor of Economics at Simon Fraser University and is currently a Professor Emeritus. He is also a co-founder of Simon Fraser University's ACT (Adaptation to Climate Change Team), an initiative that works to assist effective adaptation to climate-related challenges through policy development and awareness-raising.

Lipsey was the protagonist and protector of the doctrine of the Phillips curve, which held that a tradeoff existed between unemployment and inflation. At the 1968 American Economic Association meetings Milton Friedman countered Lipsey's arguments in what was perhaps one of the great arguments in economics.

He is an Officer of the Order of Canada and a Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada and the Econometric Society. In 2005, he won the gold medal for achievement in research from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada.

He is also the author or co-author of several economics textbooks including Positive Economics, Theory of the Second Best and Economic Transformations:General Purpose Technologies and Long Term Economic Growth. The book won the 2006 Schumpeter Prize for the best writing on evolutionary economics over the previous two years. He was co-author, with Gordon R. Sparks and Peter O. Steiner, of Economics, a standard Canadian university textbook.

External links

• ACT (Adaptation to Climate Change Team) at Simon Fraser University
• Simon Fraser University's City Program has a podcast of a presentation by him called, Buying Happiness: What does the good life cost?
• Richard Lipsey. "Yes, we saw the climate changing, but what were we to do?" Globe and Mail (BC Edition) 11 October 2007: A27
• Heather Scoffield. "The Man Who Wrote The Book" Globe and Mail (Ontario Edition) 3 June 2006: B6.
• Richard Lipsey/Simon Fraser University. 4 Jun 2006. Richard Lipsey's Home Page
• "Canadian Who's Who 1997 entry". University of Toronto Press. http://www.utpress.utoronto.ca/cgi-bin/cw2w3.cgi?p=liba&t=84917&d=3271.