ABSTRACT
John Hicks has written extensively on capital. In addition to his three very influential books which have capital in the title (1946, 1965, 1973b) he has published numerous articles. He was a scholar who returned many times in his life to the same questions, sometimes with different answers.2 In Value and Capital (1946, first edition 1939) he critically considered Böhm-Bawerk’s average period of production. His Capital and Growth (1965) was a series of exercises in growth theory. But, as with all of Hicks’s work, this book contains much discussion of an informal nature. These extended discussions show that he was thinking carefully about the implications of time for the theory of capital. We see it in his introductory remarks on methodology, particularly his discussion of equilibrium; we see it in his survey models of Smith and Ricardo (summarized above) and we see it in his concern about how to portray the transition from one equilibrium steady state growth to another, the problem of the ‘traverse.’ And then in a series of contributions in the 1970s, including his book Capital and Time (1973b, also 1976), he became very concerned with time as a topic in economics. Along with this came a revived interest in the Austrian theory of capital.
