Introductory remarks

The Theory of Wages, published in 1932, was John Hicks's first book. I was surprised to discover (from a later ‘Commentary’) that he began professional life fresh out of Oxford as a labor economist whose first two published articles dealt with wages in the building trades and the history of industrial conciliation in the United Kingdom (Hicks, 1963: 318).

In his ‘Commentary’ on the original text, Hicks remarks that 1932 was the worst possible time to produce a rather classical book on the theory of wages. Edward Chamberlin's treatise on monopolistic competition and Joan Robinson's on imperfect competition came out in 1933, and John Maynard Keynes was already beginning to develop the ideas that became The General Theory. Hicks was unaware of any of this. He was ‘out of tune’ with Cambridge.

He tells an entertaining story about his first visit to the United States in 1946 (ibid.: 311). He found that he was being welcomed, not as the author of Value and Capital (1939a), of which he was proud, but as the author of The Theory of Wages, which he was in a mood to repudiate. He mentions a dinner at Harvard with a small group of ‘eminent economists’ unnamed except for Joseph Schumpeter, though I could make an educated guess at some of the others. ‘[W]e spent the evening, I trying to persuade them that [it] was a thoroughly bad book, they trying to persuade me that it was a good one.’