Richard Lipsey

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Richard Lipsey, O.C., Ph.D., LL.D., F.R.S.C. (born August 28, 1928) is a Canadian academic and economist.

Born in Victoria, British Columbia, he received a Bachelor of Arts degree in 1951 from Victoria College (now part of the University of British Columbia), a Master of Arts degree in 1953 from the University of Toronto, and a Ph.D. in 1958 from the London School of Economics.

From 1955 to 1963, he held the positions of Assistant Lecturer, Lecturer, Reader and Professor at the London School of Economics. From 1963 to 1969, he was a Professor of Economics, Chairman of the Economics Department, and Dean of the School of Social Studies at the University of Essex in England. Returning to Canada, he held a brief position as a Visiting Professor at the University of British Columbia, before being appointed the Sir Edward Peacock professor of economics at Queen's University in Kingston, Ontario in 1970. He was the Irving Fisher Visiting Professor at Yale University from 1979 to 1980. From 1983 to 1989, he was a Senior Economic Advisor at the C.D. Howe Institute, the economic and social think tank in Toronto. In 1989, he was appointed Professor of Economics at at Simon Fraser University and is currently a Professor Emeritus.

Lipsey was the protagonist and protector of the doctrine of the Phillips curve, which held that a tradeoff existed between unemployment and inflation. At the 1968 American Economic Association meetings Milton Friedman destroyed Lipsey's arguments in what was perhaps one of the great humiliations in economics. Lipsey never fully recovered and his worked thereafter was sporadic and of mediocre quality. Nonetheless, he will be primarily remembered for his work on the economics of the second-best, a theory of constrained optimization by government of the tax system, which he coauthored with Kelvin Lancaster, a mathematical economist of high standing.

He is an Officer of the Order of Canada and a Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada and the Econometric Society. In 2005, he won the [prize] and [gold medal for achievement in research] from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada.

He is also the author or co-author of several economics textbooks including Positive Economics, Theory of the Second Best and Economic Transformations:General Purpose Technologies and Long Term Economic Growth.