ABSTRACT
When I first wrote about Pigou, nearly thirty years ago (Collard 1981), it seemed that he was in need of rehabilitation. As I then put it: ‘caught between the shadow of Marshall and the pyrotechnics of Keynes, Pigou’s standing as an economist is elusive’. Even then this was truer of the profession as a whole than it was of historians of the subject: Schumpeter (1953), for example, had always rated him highly. Now, early in the twenty-first century, Pigou’s contributions are much more widely recognised, not just in welfare economics but in labour economics, public finance, macroeconomics and business fluctuations. The present chapter includes some of the material from that initial essay (Collard 1981) and my introductions to Pigou’s Collected Economic Writings (Collard 1999 and 2002) 1 and takes account of other recent contributions. A major omis- sion here is a discussion of Industrial Fluctuations since it is treated in some depth in Chapters 3 and 4. I now feel that I greatly underestimated that book in my 1981 assessment of it. 2 Another omission is a discussion of Pigou’s treatment of future generations which, again, is explored in Chapter 19.
