John Hicks Econ 490 Fall 2019

            When I was in high school, I watched a YouTube video of an entrepreneur motivating the audience to be go-getters. He urged those watching to not wait to participate in things but rather be the leaders who start companies and movements themselves. I was extremely pumped by this video and thus, after brainstorming about what topics I found most important, I settled on an idea: to gather a group of my peers who would, on a weekly basis, travel to the elementary schools in the poorest parts of town to read to the children in the afterschool programs. It was easy enough to find willing participants; college applications were right around the corner and this would undoubtedly look great on a resume. The experience was incredibly rewarding- the students, parents, and administrators of the various schools would thank us endlessly. Parents would come up to me and tell me how they were working multiple jobs to support their family and simply didn’t have the time to read to their c

John Hicks was an incredibly impactful academic. Born in England to a journalist father, Hicks contributed many concepts and works to the world of economics- eventually earning himself and fellow economist Kenneth Arrow the Nobel Prize in this arena. In 1939, Hicks published his book “Value and Capital”. His work was one of the first to delve into the ideas surrounding general equilibrium theory, and also outlined the distinction between the substitution effect and the income effect.  Another major contribution of this economist is his invention of the IS-LM model, a graphical summary of the Keynesian understanding of macroeconomics; his analysis of the four markets (goods, labor, credit and money) was published in an economics journal of 1937. Hicks was also a notable professor, teaching at prestigious universities such as the London School of Economics, the University of Manchester, and Oxford University. I was aware of John Hicks before this assignment, due to the various e

This is probably the most genuinely fun component of a 400 level Econ course I've ever had the joy of participating in.