Knut Wicksell

Knut Wicksell (1851 to 1926) was a Swedish economist of the Stockholm school, born in Stockholm. He studied mathematics, astronomy and physics at Uppsala, took a doctorate in mathematics in 1885, and then turned to the social sciences, hearing Carl Menger lecture in Vienna in 1887. He became a full professor at Lund University in 1900. His Value, Capital and Rent made a lasting contribution to the marginalist theory of price and distribution, and Interest and Prices made him a pioneer of monetary theory, with a theory of a cumulative process of inflation that later influenced both the Keynesian and Austrian schools. He was also an outspoken reformer who argued for progressive taxation, a Neo-Malthusian population policy, women's rights and other radical causes, which held back his academic career. In Stockholm he worked alongside later Stockholm school economists such as Gunnar Myrdal.