Richard Stone

Richard Stone

Born	(1913-08-30)30 August 1913 London, England
Died	6 December 1991(1991-12-06) (aged 78) Cambridge, England
Nationality	British
Institution	Cambridge University
Field	Economics
Alma mater	Cambridge University
Influences	James Meade
Contributions	National accounts, input-output
Awards	Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences (1984)

Sir John Richard Nicholas Stone (30 August 1913 – 6 December 1991) was an eminent British economist who in 1984 received the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences for developing an accounting model that could be used to track economic activities on a national and, later, an international scale. While he was not the first economist to work in this field, he was the first to do so with double entry accounting. Double entry accounting basically states that every income item on one side of the balance sheet must be met by an expenditure item on the opposite side of the accounting sheet therefore creating a system of balance. This double entry system is the basis of nearly all modern accounting today. This allowed for a reliable way of tracking trade and wealth transfer on a global scale. He is sometimes known as the 'father of national income accounting', and is the author of studies of consumer demand statistics and demand modeling, economic growth, and input-output.^[1] During his acceptance speech Stone mentioned François Quesnay as well as the Tableau économique. Stone stated that it was one of the very first works in economics to examine various sectors on such a global level and how they are all interconnected. Stone was educated at Westminster School, Cambridge University (Caius and King's).

Biography

After graduating from Cambridge in 1936 and until World War II he worked at Lloyd's Brokers.^[2] During the war, Stone worked with James Meade as a statistician and economist for the British Government. It was at this time that they developed the early versions of the system of national accounts. After the war, Stone worked at Cambridge as the director of the new Department of Applied Economics (1945– 1955) and as P.D. Leake professor of finance and accounting (emeritus from 1980). Within the Department, he founded the Cambridge Growth Project, which developed the Cambridge Multisectoral Dynamic Model of the British economy (MDM). He was succeeded as leader of the Cambridge Growth Project by Terry Barker. A company founded by members of the Department and limited by guarantee, Cam bridge Econometrics, was founded in 1978 with Stone as its first honorary president. The company continues to develop MDM and to use the model to make economic forecasts.

In 1936, he married Winifred Mary Jenkins who was also from Cambridge. Both of them had a passion for Economics and started a monthly called Trends, which was a supplement to the periodical, Industry Illustrated. It contained articles about the British economic conditions. Soon after, in 1939, he was asked to join the Ministry of Economic Warfare. In 1960, he married Giovanna Saffi, great grandchild of Italian patriot Aurelio Saffi, who became his partner in many of his works.^[3]

Works

• Richard Stone and Giovanna Saffi Stone, Social Accounting and Economic Models (1959)
• Richard Stone and Giovanna Saffi Stone, National Income and Expenditure (1961).

References

1. ^ Counter-intuitively, the most cited of Richard Stone's works were his publications on consumer demand statistics and modeling. See Eugene Garfield: The 1984 Nobel Prizes in Economics and Literature are Awarded to Sir Richard Stone for Pioneering Systems of National Accounting and to Jaroslav Seifert, the National Poet of Czechoslovakia.
2. ^ Janus: The Papers of John Richard Nicholas Stone
3. ^ A summary biographical sketch of Sir Richard Stone (1913-1991)

External links

• Nobel prize page
• Biography
• IDEAS/RePEc