Skip to main content

Robert Giffen Bio

Robert Giffen was a economist and statistician born in Strathaven Scotland in 1837. He is most famous for his "Paradox". Giffen noted in 1890 an exception to the law of demand, certain goods demand rise as the price increase. These goods are now named after him and called Giffen goods. He is also well renowned for his work and research in the economics of banking. Robert Giffin also worked exstensivley within the British government, holding positions such as: Head of the statistical department of the board of trade, controller general, and chief statistical adviser to the government. Sadly in 1910 he suddenly passed away at the age of 72.

Comments

  1. Professor ArvanSeptember 9, 2019 at 3:59 AM

    The notion of a Giffen good makes reference to the Irish Potato Famine, a truly horrible time where many starved to death. One should therefore associate the concept with acts of desperation rather than rationality under ordinary circumstances.

    ReplyDelete

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Blog Post 7

Many classes I have taken have required attendance and require you to sign in or answer an I-clicker question in order to receive credit; however, all of them offered at least a few free absences. In my experience, most days this greatly increased the overall class attendance, but for a few days out of the year attendance would drop off significantly. Classes on Fridays before breaks or long weekends had a significantly lower attendance, even lower than those with no attendance policy. Much like the article that talked about how more parents were late to pick up their kids after a fine was imposed, students were more likely to skip classes that required attendance but offered a few days of allowed skips. When these students use their free skips, they are essentially purchasing an absence. They don’t feel bad about skipping class because they are giving up one of their free absences. Attendance in all classes before break is generally lower but having a certain number of absences se...
1 comment
Read more

Blog Post 3

The summer after my freshman year I worked in a textbook warehouse as a warehouse associate. For the first week on the job, my sole responsibility was to stand near a conveyor belt and take totes with books off the line and sort the totes by the colored labels on them. This was at best mind numbing and monotonous, but it had to be done. Because this was early in the summer, the company was solely focused on buying used books to resell in the fall, so everyday hundreds of new books would be brought into the warehouse. The totes I took off would be picked up by other workers and the books inside would be placed in their appropriate location in the warehouse. This job, at least in my opinion, was far superior because it allowed you to walk around all day rather than being stuck along a conveyor belt for eight hours a day. However, after about a week and a half working the line, I was trained on the technology and began working as one of the people who put books away. I enjoyed this ...
3 comments
Read more

Blog Post 4: Teams

            Group project can be one of the most annoying assignments required to do because of the possibility of being stuck doing the majority of work. Fortunately, the majority of group projects I have been part of haven’t turned out like this; however, they had other smaller problems. Almost all of the group projects I have been part of were for upper level econ classes. This has the benefit that most students chose to take these classes, so they are generally more knowledgeable and interested in the course content. This typically solves the problem of one or two students doing the entire project, but solving this problem uncovers a few smaller problems. My most recent group project is a prime example of some of these smaller problems.             This group project was for Econ 460, Financial Economics, and our team had to research and present on the financial health...
1 comment
Read more