Profile Major Works Resources

Alfred William Flux, 1867-1942.

English marginalist economist and statistician. 

Born in Portsmouth, A.W. Flux took undergraduate degree in mathematics Cambridge, becoming the first and only economist to top the Mathematics Tripos as Senior Wrangler in 1887 (and, at the time, the youngest).  He studied economics under the tutelage of Alfred Marshall.  In 1889, Flux won the Alfred Marshall Prize and was elected fellow at St. John's College, Cambridge. 

In 1893, Flux took up the position of Cobden Lecturer in political economy at Owens College, Manchester, a position which had once been occupied by W. Stanley Jevons.  In the course of a famous review, Alfred W. Flux was the first to identify Wicksteed's 1894 theory of distribution as being captured by Euler's Theorem on homogeneous functions.  Flux's defense of Jevons's economics against Nicholson (1896) and his reviews of Pareto's Cours (1896-97) are other notable contributions.

A.W. Flux was appointed Jevons Professor at Manchester in 1898.  In 1901, Flux moved to Canada, taking up an appointment at McGill University, helping launch the economics program there.  His Economics Principles (1904) was largely a product of his Manchester days and in 1906 oversaw a new edition of Jevons's Coal Question. 

By this time, Flux was already growing disinterested in economic theory and taking a greater concern in applied and policy matters, notably in international trade.  Reviewing trade statistics in 1894, Flux at first dismissed concerns that foreign tariff policies were responsible for the decline in British trade, a position he would rectify in 1904. 

Flux abandoned academia in 1908, returning to the UK to take up a position with the Board of Trade, where he would serve as a director of the British production censuses.  For the remainder of his career, Flux continued contributing to the development of national and international statistics.  Among his contributions here was the development of the British wholesale price index (1921) and production indices (1927).  Flux was an advocate (1929) of estimating national income from the production side rather than incomes (as had been pursued by his predecessor Giffen) and concerned with the development of standard criteria for comparative international statistics (1923).  He was a leading member of the Royal Statistical Society and recipient of the Guy Gold medal in 1930.  He had already been knighted in 1920.

Flux married into a Danish family, and would spend much of his spare time, including his retirement, in Denmark.  During the course of his career, Flux tried frequently bring the work of Scandinavian economists to the attention of English-speaking world.

 

  

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Major Works of A.W. Flux

  • Solutions of Examples in Elementary Hydrostatics (for W.H. Besant), 1891 [bk]
  • "Review of K. Wicksell's Uber Wert, Kapitale und Rente", 1894, EJ
  • "Review of P.H. Wicksteed's Essay", 1894, EJ
  • "Lecture 'On Jevons and His Work'", 1894, EJ
  • "Commercial Supremacy of Great Britain, I & II", 1894, III, 1899, EJ
  • "Review of Pareto's Cours", I & II, 1896-97, EJ
  • "British Trade and German Competition", 1897, EJ
  • "Review of Pantaleoni's Pure Economics", 1898, EJ
  • "Saving and Spending", 1899, Econ Rev
  • "The Flag and Trade: Summary review of the trade of the chief colonial countries", 1899, JRSS
  • "Review of Hobson's Economics of Distribution", 1900, EJ
  • "Some thoughts on industrial combinations", 1900, Manchester SS
  • "Preferential Tariffs and Canadian Interests", 1903, EJ
  • "Review of Fetter's Principles", 1904, JPE
  • "Britain's Place in Foreign Markets", 1904, EJ
  • Economic Principles: An introductory study, 1904. [bk, av]
  • "Do Reciprocally Preferential Tariffs Tend Towards Free Trade?", 1905, AEA.
  • "The Relation of the Protective Tariff to the Trusts", 1907, AEA
  • "Modes of Constructing Index-Numbers", 1907, QJE
  • "Canadian Tariff Revision", 1907, EJ
  • "Review of J.B. Clark's Essentials'", 1908, JRSS
  • "Review of Fisher's Capital and Interest", 1909, QJE
  • Swedish Banking Systems, 1910. [bk]
  • "Urban Vital Statistics in England and Germany", 1910, JRSS
  • "Gleanings from the Census of Production Report", 1913, JRSS
  • "The Measurement of Price Changes", 1921, JRSS
  • "International Statistical Comparisons", 1923, JRSS
  • The Foreign Exchanges, 1924.
  • "The Census of Production", 1924, JRSS
  • "British Export Trade", 1926, EJ
  • "Review of Bowley's National Income", 1927", EJ
  • "Indices of Industrial Productive Activity", 1927, JRSS
  • "The National Income", 1929, JRSS
  • "Review of Moore's Synthetic Economics", 1931, EJ
  • "Review of Clark's National Income", 1933, EJ
HET

 
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Resources on Alfred W. Flux

 

 
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