GIBSON (Arthur H.)
Human Economics. Books I. and II. Natural Economy and Cosmopolitan Economy.
An unusual work by the chartered accountant Alfred Herbert Gibson, described as an example of a ‘return to classicism and an attempt to borrow logical unity from the standpoints of natural science. Arthur H. Gibson, who published at the beginning of the century the first part of an ambitious system of economics which he never completed, makes the physical laws of production and consumption the bases of his abstract speculations’ (Suranyi-Unger, Economics in the Twentieth Century, p. 216).
Gibson is best-remembered as an observer of ‘Gibson’s Paradox’ outlined in a series of articles in the Bankers Magazine in 1923. In the context of an economy operating on a gold standard, Gibson’s paradox refers to the fact that a positive correlation exists between the rate of interest and the overall price level. The concept was popularised by John Maynard Keynes who discussed Gibson’s observation at length in his Treatise on Money.