Richard Lipsey

Richard G. Lipsey, O.C., Ph.D., LL.D., F.R.S.C. (born August 28 1928) is a Canadian academic and economist.

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

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.

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 will be primarily remembered for his work on the economics of the second-best, a theory of constrained optimization by government of the tax system, which he coauthored with Kelvin Lancaster, a mathematical economist of high standing.

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 [ [http://www.sshrc.ca/web/winning/prize_e.asp SSRCH citation] ] 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 "". 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.

He was at one time married to the poet Assia Wevill.

External links

*Simon Fraser University's [http://www.sfu.ca/city City Program] has a [http://www.sfu.ca/city/city_pgm_mp3_20.htm podcast of a presentation by him called, "Buying Happiness: What does the good life cost?"]

References

*Heather Scoffield. "The Man Who Wrote The Book" Globe and Mail (Ontario Edition) 3rd June 2006: B6.
*Richard Lipsey's Home Page. 14 Oct 2005. :Richard Lipsey/Simon Fraser University. 4 Jun 2006. .
*cite web|url=http://www.utpress.utoronto.ca/cgi-bin/cw2w3.cgi?p=liba&t=84917&d=3271|title=Canadian Who's Who 1997 entry|work=University of Toronto Press