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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 05 January 2013
INTRODUCTION
It is a great honor and privilege to be this year's Nancy Schwartz Lecturer, given the distinguished economists who preceded me, and the person honored by the series. I did not know Nancy Schwartz well personally, but I have known and learned from her work. Economic theory and industrial organization lost an important contributor at too early an age.
The usual assumption in most discussions of behavior over time is that choices today are not directly dependent on choices in the past. The great economist J. R. Hicks expressed strong disapproval of this assumption:
It is nonsense that successive consumptions are independent; the normal condition is that there is a strong complementarity between them.
[1965, page 261]It is ironic that this sentence comes at the end of a rather lengthy monograph on economic growth that relies throughout on the independence assumption.
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