Academic Work
Pigou began lecturing on economics in 1901 and started giving the course on advanced economics to second year students on which was based the education of many Cambridge economists over the next thirty years. In his early days he lectured on a variety of subjects outside economics. He became a Fellow of King's College on his second attempt in 1902, and was made Girdler's lecturer in the summer of 1904. He devoted himself to exploring the various departments of economic doctrine, and as a result published the works on which his worldwide reputation rests. His first work was more philosophical than his later work as he expanded the essay which had won him the Adam Smith prize in 1903 into Principles and Methods of Industrial Peace.
In 1908 Pigou was elected Professor of Political Economy at the University of Cambridge in succession to Alfred Marshall. He held the post until 1943. One of his early acts was to provide private financial support for John Maynard Keynes to work on probability theory. Pigou and Keynes had great affection and mutual regard for each other and their intellectual differences never put their personal friendship seriously in jeopardy.
Nevertheless, the externality concept remains central to modern welfare economics and particularly to environmental economics.
A neglected aspect of Pigou's work is his analysis of a range of labour-market phenomena studied by subsequent economists, including collective bargaining, wage rigidity, internal labor markets, segmented labour market, and human capital.
In a couple of lectures delivered in 1949 he made a more favourable, though still critical evaluation of Keynes' work: "I should say... that in setting out and developing his fundamental conception, Keynes made a very important, original and valuable addition to the armoury of economic analysis". He later said that he had come with the passage of time to feel that he had failed earlier to appreciate some of the important things that Keynes was trying to say.
Read more about this topic: Arthur Cecil Pigou
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