JAMES ALAN CALVERT BROWN: AN APPRECIATION*
| Author | Richard Stone |
| Date | 01 August 1985 |
| DOI | http://doi.org/10.1111/j.1468-0084.1985.mp47003001.x |
| Published date | 01 August 1985 |
OXFORD BULLETIN
of
ECONOMICS and STATISTICS
OXFORD BULLETIN OF ECONOMICS AND STATISTICS, 47, 3(1985)
0305-9049 $3.00
JAMES ALAN CALVERT BROWN:
AN APPRECIATION*
Richard Stone
Alan Brown was born at Bury in Lancashire on 8 July 1922, the son of
Harry and Mary Brown. He was educated at Bury Grammar School and
Emmanuel College, Cambridge, where he was a major scholar in classics.
He took Part I of the Tripos in 1942. He then entered the Army, rising
to the rank of captain in the Intelligence Corps. His war service took
him to India and Burma, and his duties there requiring a knowledge of
Japanese he learnt the language in a matter of months. In 1946 he
returned to Cambridge and completed his studies by taking a degree
in economics in 1947.
When I got to know him he was a member of the statistical division
of the Ministry of Agriculture, Fisheries and Food and was working on
an analysis of family food budgets. We saw quite a lot of each other and
one day he asked me if he might spend a year or two at the Department
of Applied Economics at Cambridge, of which I was then the Director,
to equip himself better for his official duties. When he came as a
research officer in 1952 he had no idea of switching to an academic
career, but as things turned out he remained with us until he was
appointed to the Chair of Econometrics at Bristol in 1965.
In the early 1950's one of the main projects at the Department related
to consumers' expenditure and behaviour. Alan contributed a number
of papers in this field, extending it to include the distribution of
income among various groups in the community [2-9, 12-181. Without
attempting to describe this work in detail, I shall enlarge a little on two
papers. One is his contribution to the Linear Programming Conference
organised by Ferranti Ltd in 1954 [2] Having calculated a minimum
cost diet and obtained the usual monotonous list consisting of five
* Editorial Note: Alan Brown was an Editor of the BULLETIN from 1978 until his death.
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Volume 47 August 1985 No. 3
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