Ralph Hawtrey

Ralph Hawtrey (born November 22, 1879, Slough, Buckinghamshire, England—died March 21, 1975, London) was a British economist who developed a concept that later became known as the multiplier.

Hawtrey was educated at Eton and the University of Cambridge, graduating with first-class honours in mathematics in 1901. He spent his working life as a civil servant and played a key role in the Genoa Conference of 1922, which attempted to devise arrangements for a stable return to the gold standard. Hawtrey studied economics after leaving Cambridge. He held few academic positions; he taught at Harvard (1928–29) and was Price Professor of International Economics at the Royal Institute of International Affairs (1947–52). He was knighted in 1956.

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Hawtrey advocated a purely monetary theory of economic fluctuations in which changes in money supply produce changes in expectations and adjustments in stocks. Stocks of goods in the hands of retailers and wholesalers are given a key role in Hawtrey’s theory; they are extremely sensitive to interest charges, and it is through their agency that the bank rate of interest is able to affect the level of activity.

Hawtrey deserves credit for a number of significant developments to which his analysis led him. These include an original form of the cash balance approach to the quantity theory of money, to which he grafted an income approach, foreshadowing later treatment by British economist John Maynard Keynes. He also advanced, as early as 1931, the concept that later became known as the multiplier, a coefficient showing the effect of a change in total national investment on the amount of total national income. This concept was given a central role by Keynes, and, indeed, Hawtrey played a significant role in the development of Keynes’s thought in the years between the latter’s Treatise and his General Theory.