Terence Gorman Postgraduate Prize


The prize was founded by a bequest from Mrs Dorinda Gorman in memory of her husband, the distinguished Economist W M (Terence) Gorman, a Trinity College Dublin economics graduate of 1948. It is awarded annually to the best student in the M.Sc. (Econ). 

Adjudicated by John Sutton, John Hicks Professor of Economics,  London School of Economics and Political Science.

2005 W M Gorman Prize

Tara Mitchell

2006 W M Gorman Prize

Qi Li  &  Denis Tkachenko (Joint first in the class)

http://www.nuff.ox.ac.uk/economics/people/fellows/gormancv.htm

William Moore (Terence) Gorman

Written by Elizabeth Martin and Neil Shephard.
We are most grateful to Dorinda Gorman for pointing out some
errors in an earlier draft and providing additional information.


BORN
17th June, 1923 at Kesh, County Fermanagh, Northern Ireland.
PARENTS: Captain Richard Gorman (d. 1927), of
Lusaka, Northern Rhodesia, and Sarah Crawford Gorman, née Moore (d. 1963), of Kesh, County Fermanagh, Northern Ireland.
MARRIED
29th December 1950 Dorinda (Din) Maud Scott, daughter of Walter T. Scott.
DIED
13th January 2003 at Oxford, England.


SCHOOLS

Mount Temple School, Rathgar, Dublin and Foyle College, Derry.


TRINITY COLLEGE, DUBLIN

1941 Entered as a Mathematical Sizar.
1943 Elected a Foundation Scholar in Mathematics.
1948 First Class Moderator in Economics and Political Science Gold Medallist.
1949 First Class Moderator in Mathematics.

While at Trinity College Terence won various prizes in mathematics and economics.


JOBS

1943-1946 Radio mechanic in the Fleet Air Arm. Acting Petty Officer 1945-1946.
1949 January: Research Associate in Economics, University of
Birmingham.
1949 October: Assistant Lecturer in Economics, University of
Birmingham.
1951 Lecturer in Statistics and Econometrics,
University of Birmingham.
1956-1957 Visiting Professor of Economics and Statistics,
Iowa State College, Ames (later called Iowa State University).
1957 Senior Lecturer in charge of the Department of Econometrics and Social Statistics,
University of Birmingham.
1962-1967, Professor of Economics at
Oxford University & Professorial Fellow at Nuffield College, Oxford.
1966-1967, National Science Fellow,
Stanford University.
1967-1979, Professor of Economics,
London School of Economics.
1970-1971, Visiting Professor,
University of North Carolina.
1979-1983, Official Fellow in Economics,
Nuffield College, Oxford.
1979-1980, John Hinkley Visiting Professor, Department of Political Economy,
John Hopkins University.
1983-1990, Senior Research Fellow,
Nuffield College, Oxford.
1986-1998, Visiting Professor of Economics,
University College, London.
1987, summer, Killam Fellow,
University of British Columbia.
1990-2003, Emeritus Fellow,
Nuffield College, Oxford.

EDITORIAL DUTIES

Associate Editor of Econometrica 1959-1972.

ADMINISTRATIVE ROLES

Member of the Human Sciences Sub-committee of the Social Research Council 1962-1966.
Member of the Economics Committee of the Social Science Research Council 1972-1976.

HONOURS

Fellow of the Econometric Society, 1961.
Fellow of the
British Academy, 1978.
Member of the Council of the Econometric Society, 1968-1970, 1974-1979, 1984-1986.
Chair of the European Branch of the Econometric Society, 1971-1973.
Second vice-President, first vice-President, and President of the Econometric Society in 1969, 1970 and 1972, respectively.
Honourary Foreign Member,
American Academy of Arts and Sciences, 1986.
Honorary Foreign Member of the American Economic Association, 1988.
Honorary Fellow of
Trinity College, Dublin, 14 May 1990.
Member of Academia Europaea, July 1990.
Honorary Fellow of LSE, 1994.
Honorary doctorates: Hon. D.Soc.Sc.
Birmingham University (1973), Hon. D.Sc. (SocSci) Southampton University (1974), Hon.D.Econ.Sc. The National University of Ireland (1986) and Hon. D.Sc. (Econ) University College London (1998).


PUBLICATIONS

Gorman, W.M. (1953) Community Preference Fields, Econometrica, 21, 63-80. Reprinted in Collected Works, Blackorby, C. and A. F. Shorrocks (1995) 238-55.

Gorman, W.M. (1955) The Intransitivity of Certain Criteria Used in Welfare Economics, Oxford Economic Papers, 7, 25-35.

Gorman, W.M. (1957) Convex Indifference Curves and Diminishing Marginal Utility, The Journal of Political Economy, 65, 40-50.

Gorman, W.M. (1957) A Note on 'A Revised Theory of Expectations', The Economic Journal, 67, 549-551.

Gorman, W.M. (1957) Intertemporal choice and the shape of indifference maps, Metroeconomica, 9, 1-22.

Gorman, W.M. (1957) How surprising is a chain of coincidences, Metroeconomica, 9, 112-115.

Gorman, W.M. (1958) Tariffs, Retaliation, and the Elasticity of Demand for Imports, The Review of Economic Studies, 25, 133-162.

Gorman, W.M. (1959) The Effect of Tariffs on the Level and Terms of Trade, The Journal of Political Economy, 67, 246-265.

Gorman, W.M. (1959) The Empirical Implications of a Utility Tree: A Further Comment, Econometrica, 27, 489.

Gorman, W.M. (1959) Separable Utility and Aggregation, Econometrica, 27, 469-481. Reprinted in Collected Works, Blackorby, C. and A. F. Shorrocks (1995) 34-47.

Gorman, W.M. (1959) Are Social Indifference Curves Convex?, The Quarterly Journal of Economics, 73, 485-496

Gorman, W.M. (1960) Tariffs and Trade in a Two-Good World, International Economic Review, 1, 223-229

Gorman, W.M. (1961) The Elasticity of Demand for Imports with Close, but Imperfect Substitutes, International Economic Review, 2, 371-376.

Gorman, W.M. (1961) On a class of preference fields, Metroeconomica, 13, 53-56. Reprinted in Collected Works, Blackorby, C. and A. F. Shorrocks (1995) 278-82.

Gorman, W.M. (1963) Additive Logarithmic Preferences A Further Note, The Review of Economic Studies, 30, 56-62.

Gorman, W.M. (1964) Professor Friedman's Consumption Function and the Theory of Choice, Econometrica, 32, 189-197. Reprinted in Collected Works, Blackorby, C. and A. F. Shorrocks (1995) 91-99.

Gorman, W.M. (1964) More Scope for Qualitative Economics, The Review of Economic Studies, 31, 65-68.

Gorman, W.M. (1965) Production Functions in which the Elasticities of Substitution Stand in Fixed Proportions to Each Other, The Review of Economic Studies, 32, 217-224.

Gorman, W.M. (1967) Tastes, Habits and Choices, International Economic Review, 8, 218-222

Gorman, W.M. (1968) Conditions for Additive Separability, Econometrica, 36, 605-609. Reprinted in Collected Works, Blackorby, C. and A. F. Shorrocks (1995) 142-46.

Gorman, W.M. (1968) The Structure of Utility Functions, The Review of Economic Studies, 35, 367-390. Reprinted in Collected Works, Blackorby, C. and A. F. Shorrocks (1995) 150-81.

Gorman, W.M. (1968) Measuring the Quantities of Fixed Factors, in 'Value, Capital and Growth: Papers in Honour of Sir John Hicks', edited by James Nathabiel Wolfe, Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. Reprinted in Collected Works, Blackorby, C. and A. F. Shorrocks (1995) 325-52.

Gorman, W.M. (1971) Clontarf Revisited, The Review of Economic Studies, 38, 116.

Gorman, W.M. (1971) Apologia for a Lemma, The Review of Economic Studies, 38, 114.

Gorman, W.M. (1980) A Possible Procedure for Analysing Quality Differentials in the Egg Market, The Review of Economic Studies, 47, 843-856.

Gorman, W.M. (1981) Some Engel Curves, in 'Essays in the Theory and Measurement of Consumer Behaviour in Honour of Richard Stone', 7-29, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Reprinted in Collected Works, Blackorby, C. and A. F. Shorrocks (1995) 356-78.

Gorman, W.M. (1984) Towards a Better Economic Methodology, in 'Economics in Disarray,' edited by Peter Wiles and Guy Routh, Oxford and New York: Blackwell, 260-88. ISBN: 0631134360.

Gorman, W.M. (1984) Le Chatelier and General Equilibrium, in 'Demand, Equilibrium, and Trade: Essays in Honor of Ivor F. Pearce,' edited by A. Ingham and A.M. Ulph, New York: St. Martin's Press 1984; 1-18.

Gorman, W.M. (1986) Compatible Indices, The Economic Journal, 96, Supplement: Conference Papers, 83-95.

Gorman, W. M. (1986) Assembling Efficient Organizations? in 'Essays in honor of Kenneth J. Arrow. Volume 3. Uncertainty, information, and communication.' edited by Walter P. Heller, Ross M Starr and David A Starrett, Cambridge; New York and Sydney: Cambridge University Press 1986; 213-28. Also in Mathematical Models in Economics - Oxford University Mathematical Economic Seminar 25th Anniversary Volume, Edited by M. O. L. Bacharach, M. A. H. Dempster, and J. L. Enos, Clarendon Press, Oxford. Reprinted in Collected Works, Blackorby, C. and A. F. Shorrocks (1995) 413-27.

Gorman, W.M. (1987) Separability, in 'The New Palgrave Dictionary of Economics,' volume 3, edited by John Eatwell, Murray Milgate and Peter Newman, Macmillian Publishers, 305-330. ISBN:0333740408. Reprinted in Collected Works, Blackorby, C. and A. F. Shorrocks (1995) 3-17.

Gorman, W.M. and Gareth D. Myles (1987) Characteristics, in 'The New Palgrave Dictionary of Economics,' volume 3, edited by John Eatwell, Murray Milgate and Peter Newman, Macmillian Publishers, 403-406. ISBN:0333740408.

Gorman, W.M. (1990) A Comment, in 'Measurement and modelling in economics,' edited by G.D. Myles, Elsevier Science Publishers, Amsterdam, 153-156. ISBN: 0444885153.

Gorman, W.M. (1990) More Measures for Fixed Factors, in 'Measurement and Modelling in Economics,' edited by G.D. Myles, Elsevier Science Publishers, Amsterdam, 381-411. ISBN: 0444885153. Reprinted in Collected Works, Blackorby, C. and A. F. Shorrocks (1995) 413-27.

Gorman, W.M. (1992) Educating Our Masters, in 'Economic analysis of markets and games: Essays in honor of Frank Hahn,' edited by Douglas Gale, Oliver Hart, Eric Maskin and Partha Dasgupta, Cambridge and London: MIT Press, 585-601. ISBN: 0262041278.

Reports of various Econometric Society meetings where abstracts from Terence appear.

Gorman, W.M. (1954) Klein aggregates and conventional index numbers. Econometrica 22, 113-114.

Gorman, W.M. (1960) The demand for fish, an application of factor analysis. Econometrica 28, 649-652.

Blackorby, C. and A. F. Shorrocks (1995) Separability and Aggregation - The Collected Works of W. M. Gorman, Volume I, Oxford University Press, Clarendon Press, Oxford. ISBN: 0198285213.

Here we list the 13 papers in the book not given above.

Two-Stage Budgeting, 22-29.

Notes on Divisia Indices, 50-59.

Consumer Budgets and Price Indices, 65-87.

Quasi-separable Preferences, Costs, and Technologies, 104-14.

Separability and Linear Engel Curves, 119-26.

The Concavity of Additive Utility Functions, 128-35.

Conditions for Generalized Additive Separability, 186-207.

Klein Aggregates and Conventional Index Numbers, 261-76.

Capital Aggregation in Vintage Models, 286-320

Muellbauer's Representative Consumer, 407-10.

Aggregates for Variable Goods: An Application of Duality, 431-38.

Aggregation in the Short and Long Run, 443-77.

Long-Run Aggregates under Constant Returns, 480-86.

UNPUBLISHED PAPERS AT NUFFIELD COLLEGE LIBRARY

Gorman, W. M. (1948) Demand for Tomatoes in Ireland: with special emphasis on the period May-September 1948, Presented as a B.A. (Honours) thesis at Trinity College, Dublin, 1948.

Gorman, W. M. and Gareth D. Myles (1986) 'Separability and characteristics.'



Memorial Meeting

TERENCE GORMAN
1923 - 2003

Lecturer, University of Birmingham, 1949-61
Professor of Economics, Oxford, and
Professorial Fellow, Nuffield College, 1962-7
Professor of Economics, LSE, 1967-79
Official Fellow, Nuffield College, 1979-83
Senior Research Fellow, 1983-90
Emeritus Fellow 1990-2003

Saturday 15 March 2003 at 2.30 p.m.
Nuffield College Hall
Oxford

Speakers:

A.B. Atkinson

John N.J. Muellbauer

Tim Besley

Frank Hahn

Robert Solow

A.H. Halsey

Christopher Bliss



Tony Atkinson
The Warden,
Nuffield College

On behalf of the College, I would like to welcome you all to this Memorial Meeting for Terence Gorman.

It is a source of great sadness that Terence is no longer with us, for those who worked with him and those who were his colleagues in Birmingham, LSE and here in Oxford. It is evidently especially so for Dorinda and family, and I would like to extend a particularly warm welcome to them.

I am sure however that Terence would not have wished this to be a sad occasion. We are here to celebrate Terence, his life, and his deep scientific contributions. We shall be hearing more about these from the speakers that follow.

For myself, I can distinctly remember the first occasion on which I heard Terence speak, at a seminar in the Autumn of 1967 in Cambridge, attended by a number of people here this afternoon. Of course, I had been led to expect something special by Frank Hahn, whom it is very good to see today, but the seminar exceeded even my expectations. I can vividly remember Terence's opening, which was 'This is a paper that I have been peddling all over the country'. The paper of which he spoke so self-depreciatingly was 'The Structure of Utility Functions', a much celebrated article containing a central theorem of great power and the proof of which I thought I understood for as long as Terence was talking. One of Terence's remarkable characteristics was the ability both to convey his own enthusiasm for viewing a problem in a particular way and to instill confidence in his listeners that they could themselves understand it.

Another characteristic was his willingness to admit mistakes, as in a subsequent exchange in the Review of Economic Studies, where the paper was published, culminating in his 22-line article 'Clontarf Revisited', a title that reflected his historical interests and knowledge. This paper contains the only reference in that distinguished journal to the Song of King Gormont, from whom he claimed the Gormans to be descended.

Re-reading his Collected Papers yesterday, I was struck by how well Terence's 'thinking aloud' style of exposition succeeds in conveying a sense of the way in which intellectual progress is made. His confession in his Hicks Festschrift chapter, to 'a pair of idiotic mistakes, which luckily cancel out' both helps and encourages those who are trying to follow the trail he is blazing. The papers have a freshness and vitality that mean that his work will continue to inspire new researchers to develop further the subjects he opened up.

A number of those who have been so inspired have told me that they are very sorry not to be able to be here this afternoon including Chuck Blackorby and Richard Blundell. Michael Brock, who was Warden for 10 of the years that Terence was active in the Economics Group, has asked me to say how very sorry he is that he has an unavoidable prior engagement.

We have a number of speakers, and I have asked them to introduce themselves. I simply want to thank them for having agreed to participate. In particular, the College is very appreciative of the fact that Bob Solow has flown specially across the Atlantic to attend this meeting. When I asked him, he said yes immediately without hesitation, and this I think is a very clear mark of the esteem in which Terence was held and the warmth that people feel when they remember him.



John Muellbauer
Professor of Economics,
Nuffield College


Personal links

Terence Gorman was one of the outstanding economists of the twentieth century. I owe a great personal debt to Terence in my research and ways of thinking about economics. My first encounter with Terence's work was as a doctoral student in Berkeley in the late 1960s, in particular, through his writings on aggregation and cost functions, which give rigorous backing to the every-day notion of the 'cost of living index'. I had been primed in the tools Terence liked to use, especially duality theory, in lectures by Dan McFadden, subsequently a Nobel laureate. Dan had been invited by Terence to come to Oxford as a post-doctoral fellow in 1962, but had been unable to accept. He recently wrote to me that: 'from the beginning, I was teaching about the Gorman forms….. we made index number theory part of the micro sequence. Terence's work was an inspiration to me, and I regret that it was impossible for me to go to Oxford and work with him directly.'

I first met Terence in 1972, when applying for posts in London. Greater personal contact followed, made easier by moving to Birkbeck College, London, only 20 minutes away from the LSE. The weekly seminar of economic theory and econometrics at the LSE, was run by the troika of Terence, Frank Hahn and Dennis Sargan - though young Turks such as David Hendry made themselves increasingly felt. One often felt intimidated by the sheer brilliance on display, which in Terence's case, uniquely encompassed both disciplines.

It was around this time that I first met Din (Dorinda), Terence's wife. Even then Terence was the archetypal absent-minded professor - though his ability to think in complex geometrical spaces far from the ken of ordinary folk, was unusually combined with impish charm and a great benevolence to students and young researchers. The profession and all Terence's colleagues owe Din a deep debt of gratitude for her wonderful support and life-long, gentle sustaining of Terence.

Terence's first great contribution to economics was on aggregation, in his 1953 paper in Econometrica. By the time he got the proofs back he had discovered duality theory, and apparently wanted to rewrite the paper using the new tools. In the event, he returned to the subject in his 1961 paper in Metroeconomica (a somewhat obscure journal today) on the 'representative consumer'. He established the conditions under which aggregate market demand could be said to correspond to the choices of an average consumer.

This paper implied a simple way of measuring the distributional impact of inflation, which I explored in my first published paper. Further research led me to ask questions about the nature of Gorman's representative consumer to whom the Retail Price Index might be said to correspond. In his 1961 paper, Terence was the first to represent mathematically the required restriction on consumers' preference patterns, which for every consumer requires the same linear relationship between spending on individual goods and total spending (a linear Engel curve). On the standard concept of the representative consumer, the budget shares used to weight the prices in the Retail Price Index correspond to the spending pattern of a household with average income. At the time, average income implied an income level around 63 percent from the bottom of the income distribution. However, by examining a more realistic (non-linear) relationship between food expenditure and income, I found that the Retail Price Index corresponded to an income level that was nearer to the 70th percentile in the distribution, in other words, representing the expenditure patterns for a relatively affluent part of the community. This suggested a more general concept of the representative consumer, one whose income is not equal to average income.

Terence was enormously interested in this research and helpful to me in drawing out the implications of this new notion of the representative consumer. He also pointed me to a further generalisation of the general form of preferences I had derived in a 1975 paper. He discussed this in a 1976 note, which can be found in volume I of Chuck Blackorby and Tony Shorrocks' admirable collection of Terence's work. I was honoured when he suggested that this work was in part a stimulus for his own masterful paper, modestly entitled, 'Some Engel Curves' published in 1981.

His paper showed under which conditions, quite general, non-linear Engel curves linking expenditure on particular goods with total spending, were consistent with utility maximisation. It is a brilliant paper, even if few, including myself, had the mathematical prowess to follow all the steps in Terence's proofs. Developments from this work have been heavily used, ever since, by econometricians studying individual and aggregate household behaviour.

I have given some examples of Terence's contributions to economics. Later speakers will show his contributions were far more wide-ranging. To continue the personal connection, Terence's ideas about budgeting and decentralisation in decision-making can be found throughout my 1980 book on consumer behaviour with Angus Deaton. This suggests how much the state of knowledge then, and indeed still now, depended on his ideas. In 1981, in part due to Terence's enthusiastic support, I was appointed a Fellow at Nuffield, and became a colleague.


Terence as colleague and mentor to students

Terence's intellectual presence at Nuffield was strongly felt in the lunch-time theory workshop convened by Jim Mirrlees, in the famous Friday seminar in Economic Theory and Econometrics, and in the Gorman workshop he established for research students. For the Friday seminars, Terence always digested the paper in advance, never giving the speaker more than five minutes grace before launching the first of a flood of intriguing and penetrating questions. He was widely read in history, as well as in economics, mathematics and statistical theory, and speakers, particularly from North America, were often left wide-eyed by the breadth of reference he brought to bear on their work. The Gorman workshop continues to this day, except that it now requires the labour of three academics. Many famous economists, one of whom will speak next, had important formative experiences in the workshop over port and claret (generously supplied by Terence himself).

Terence was endlessly supportive of promising young students and researchers (and terrified some). Several courageous appointment decisions of young economists with limited track records, that may at first sight have looked risky to his colleagues, were influenced by Terence's far-sightedness. The brilliant appointment of the youthful John Vickers was a case in point.

A recurring concern of Terence's was his view that established institutions, and especially research institutions, often tended to become complacent and inward-turning, which could introduce distortion in appointments and a deterioration in quality. He wanted Nuffield College to remain at the frontier of international standards of excellence Thus, he upheld high intellectual standards, and sought fairness and openness in decision-making and appointments with a Protestant fervour. His imprint in this respect has been a lasting one.

In presenting his own work, he was always very modest and usually quite nervous. All his life he was given to overestimating the cleverness and mathematical sophistication of his audience, and their familiarity with the geometrical spaces in which he thought. (Though with such colleagues as Jim Mirrlees, Christopher Bliss, David Hendry and others, one might have forgiven him this tendency). Characteristically, he underestimated his own contribution. Though he was elected President of the Econometric Society in 1972, he deserved even wider recognition. The cognoscenti, of course, were fully aware of his greatness, and, in what follows, some of them will tell us more.



Tim Besley
Professor of Economics, LSE

Terence Gorman was without doubt one of the most distinguished economists of the 20th century and each of us here today has our own unique memory and appreciation of him. If I have a comparative advantage in this gathering, it comes from the fact that I was one of Terence's DPhil students in the mid 1980s. His doctoral students (at least those for whom he had primary supervision) were relatively small in number. However, the set of students whom he mentored and influenced was much larger. Perhaps the main vehicle for this was the Gorman workshop - an informal group that met after dinner in Terence's room about which I will have more to say later.


Personal Recollections:

I distinctly remember my first encounter with Terence who interviewed me for entry to Nuffield. I also remember his presence in the common room soon after arriving in Nuffield as a student. I was aware that there was a distinguished economist W.M. Gorman, but (to my embarrassment) it took me a short while to realise that this was the same person as Terence Gorman. In terms of mathematical sophistication I was at the time (and sadly remain) at the other end of the spectrum from Terence. But contrary to what might be thought from reading his work, this was no barrier to being able to learn from him. That said, on some matters, his intuition seemed to work on a higher plane than most others. His questions seemed always based on simple real world observations - the antithesis of what I saw as sophisticated economics at the time. I wanted to add bells, whistles and equations and he always pulled things back to common sense. Overtime I came to see that his simple insights based on common sense and judiciously selected anecdotes contained the essence of the phenomenon in question. Only having got this level of thinking straight was there any point in proceeding further and pursuing sophistication.

A wonderful example of Terence's work is his 'Tricks with Utility Functions' a paper which we are hoping to reprint along with a series of contributed articles in a future issue of the Economic Journal. This article laid bare Terence's ambition to do 'economics economically' and he often talked of writing a book of this title, which sadly never came to fruition, although I recently came across some hand written chapters of this project in one of my filing cabinets. In general, his articles are full of powerful and general mathematical arguments, but relatively little of the motivation and discussion, which made discussing economics with Terence so enjoyable, survive in print.

After becoming his DPhil student, I spent hours with Terence only a few of them discussing economics. He often preferred to discuss politics or history. He would often remark how he was advantaged in having a good mathematical training, not because it made him a better economist, but because it left him with more time for reading history. I also remember the importance of his wife Dorinda. Terence would frequently ask me to call Din in advance of any meeting that we had arranged to make sure he was going to be there. Modern satellite navigation systems have nothing on Din's ability to know Terence's exact coordinates at any point in time. She was clearly a huge source of support to Terence in all aspects of his life.

Some who looked only at Terence's written contributions might be inclined to refer to him as an 'economic theorist' but I recall how on more than one occasion, he was careful to push his case for being viewed principally as an applied economist. As far as I am aware, he did not publish applications to data of his ideas. However, there is no doubt that he was always motivated to think about concrete real world problems. Perhaps the best-known example was his motivation of the characteristics approach with reference to the problem of analyzing quality differentials in the egg market. With characteristic modesty, he claimed in that paper that its success should be viewed in terms of whether it would be of use to the Iowan egg farmer. His contributions that helped to build the modern consumer theory were thus 'bottom up' and certainly not constructed from armchair reflection. My understanding is that his interest in consumer demand first surfaced in his undergraduate thesis on the tomato market in Dublin.

John Muellbauer has already noted that Terence was extremely generous in giving his time to others with related interests. A chat with Terence could be intimidating as well amusing. On a walk from their country cottage to a local pub, Terence and a young colleague were chatting and Terence made a claim about separability that the young colleague knew to be incorrect but said that he could not remember why. Terence responded by saying that when I say 'dit' I mean the derivative with respect to utility, when I say 'dot' or 'dash' I mean a derivative with respect to a price. He then proceeded to deliver several minutes of Morse code that seemed completely incomprehensible, and finally said, 'you are right, you are absolutely brilliant'. The young colleague had not understood a thing except a pretty clear demonstration of who was brilliant.


The Gorman Workshop

For generations of students who passed through Nuffield they will remember their encounters with Terence in the Gorman workshop. Now I am sure that the workshop took place all the year round. But my abiding memory is of being crammed into Terence's room on a winter's evening with a small amount of artificial light and the gas fire blazing. But I am sure that this is just a reconstructed memory based on the warmth that we all felt in being together with Terence in his room to discuss economics at such a formative stage.

The idea was that each student in turn would present a written paper circulated to the group in advance. Before the evening on which we had to present, we were called to a one-on-one session with Terence. By the time one arrived to talk to him, the written copy was covered in fluorescent highlighter and remarks in his rather baroque (but stylish) handwriting. Terence was invariably kind and supportive in his comments. He appreciated that many of us were trying to make the difficult transition from consumers to producers of economics. On the occasion of the workshop itself, Terence was in his element. He would illuminate, baffle and entertain in equal measure. On the table in front us were an assortment of glasses, some mineral water and a variety of alcoholic drinks, which I imagine (since I cannot remember for sure) were claret, port or sherry. Terence would drink only water, but he often remarked that he had become something of a connoisseur of mineral water and could taste the difference between the varieties on offer - no doubt he had in mind an economical representation in terms of a few key characteristics.

The Gorman workshops continue to this day in Nuffield and still bear his name. I have no doubt that these were an ideal forum for Terence. He could tutor without lecturing and express his general views about how economics should be done. I also recall his tendency to rank the abilities of co-authors whose papers were mentioned during the proceeding. Moreover, no figure in the economics profession, however established, was spared. I dare say that some of those whose names were mentioned on such occasions are in the room today.

Richard Blundell had the foresight to involve Terence in setting up a similar workshop at UCL where Terence was a visiting Professor through the mid 1990s. The UCL economics department was proud of its association with Terence and has founded a Gorman lecture series in his honour.


Terence at LSE

I would like to say a little bit about Terence Gorman as a leading figure at the LSE at an important time in the history of the economics department. He was among a key group that guaranteed that LSE remained in the mainstream of world economics. When I knew Terence at Oxford, he recalled his LSE days (and his days at Birmingham) with great affection. Frank Hahn, who I am delighted to see here today, was frequently mentioned in discussions about the glory days of Birmingham and LSE about which we doubtless will learn more later.

While at LSE, Terence also left his imprint on the structure of the BSc(Econ) Special Subject: Econometrics and Mathematical Economics. He was very much opposed to having too narrow a definition of 'econometrics' in the degree. For this reason the compulsory 3rd Year Projects were called 'Quantitative Economics Projects' and not 'Econometrics Projects'. This meant we were able to accept a wide variety of topics, as almost anything was OK as long as there was some quantitative analysis of actual data. This was not without trials and Jim Thomas remembers that Terence had some problems in persuading the External Examiner to agree that a Project written by an excellent, but perverse student who chose to produce a Marxist critique of neo-Classical economics without a single number in it was acceptable.


The Legacy of Ideas

Two aspects of economics particularly concerned Terence. First was the relationship between individual behavior and aggregate outcomes. Although much of economics is about the study of aggregates: unemployment, GDP, saving, etc, these are the product of underlying individual decisions. Terence was the first to develop a systematic framework to explore the link between micro and macro relationships in economics. His first published paper (already referred to by John Muellbauer) was on this subject and appeared in Econometrica in 1953. There, he established the necessary and sufficient conditions under which a community of individuals could be said to have preferences. This paper was original, elegant and important; it is still widely cited today.

Second, he contributed to our understanding of individual decisions themselves. He began from the observation that the kinds of decisions that individuals make are enormously complicated and that economics, as a science, needs to find a simple, yet reasonable representation of individual actions. He formulated the idea that decisions might be considered in two stages - first making choices over broad categories (such as food, housing and clothing) and then making more detailed allocations. Pretty much every economic study of demand undertaken today is explicitly or implicitly taking advantage of Terence's insights.

The other place where I have distinct recollections of Terence while I was a student here in Oxford was his interventions in seminars. He was always an active and vocal seminar participant. I clearly remember interventions that began with 'When I was a school boy in Ireland …' or 'I recall studying the market for tomatoes in Dublin …'Such interventions were often disarming for the speaker, but ended by making a point of great importance. I have never forgotten Terence's ability to suggest simplifications - often through convenient normalizations - which had escaped the paper's author. I have since tried wherever possible to look for such simplifications in my own work and on the rare occasions that I have found them, I think of Terence. In this regard, he often spoke of his school maths teacher who had suggested to him that 'he should never climb into a whole in order to climb out'. The same teacher had apparently advised him that there were two very useful numbers - one and zero which should be used whenever possible. His insight about the use of judicious normalizations came, I am sure directly, from taking this advice seriously.

I, like everyone here today, was proud to have had the opportunity to learn from Terence. He influenced our discipline through his writings but he also touched us through our personal contacts with him. Terence took economics extremely seriously and yet you could not help but feel that he found discussing economics and ideas in general to be fun. While the standards that he set in research are not attainable for most of us, we are at least able to emulate his sense of fun and passionate commitment to learning.



Frank Hahn
Emeritus Professor of Economics,
University of Cambridge

Terence was my best friend. We had known each other since 1948 or 49 when he arrived in Birmingham to teach statistics fresh from Trinity Dublin. He had to take some further mathematics examination in Dublin, which did not weigh on him in the slightest and he took his double first and gold medal shortly there after. Our long friendship had some memorable moments and I have a fistful of stories showing Terence's eccentricity and innocence. If after I have given some account of his many achievements there is some time left I shall squeeze in one or two of them. Here I want to record that I thought that he was not only touched by genius but also by goodness. He seemed to lack the ambitions usual in academic circles. This must account for his comparative lack of worldly success.

Terence's main interest was the theory of choice to which he made outstanding contributions. I believe that one of his first papers was on the existence of community indifference curves when he established a full set of necessary conditions. Interestingly these turn out to be important in recent results in the theory of missing markets. This led to his work on aggregation and this in turn led him to the duality theory of consumer behaviour. The latter he fully explored long before it appeared in the literature. It banished nasty bordered Hessians and much old methods for the theory of consumer choice. It substituted the much deeper and simpler notions of concavity and convexity, and made this branch of theory really quite beautiful. Since Terence didn't publish it, he missed the boat. Next he turned to two-stage-choice, and aggregating that. That too was discovered independently by others, but here his priority was quite definite, since he had written an undergraduate thesis on a related topic. That was orderings over the space of qualities, where he used factor analysis. This was preceded by a thesis on the price of tomatoes, which was based on his research on the Dublin market, and where he had to account for the different prices of different qualities of tomatoes.

Terence also wrote what is called the seminal paper on the aggregation of capital, the first version of which was published in the Festschrift for Hicks. This struck me as better and more complete and elegant than all the previous work on this subject, which included Leontief and Nataf and Klein. It was one of my sorrows that I could not refer Mrs. Joan Robinson to this piece, since the mathematics was beyond her. Even now there are people in Cambridge running around yapping about capital aggregation which is given some deep anti-neoclassical significance. Terence long ago showed there is nothing 'deep' to it.
Terence was also an outstanding applied economist. The required econometrics he had digested before breakfast, and caused no problem. Characteristically, I am not aware that he chose to write or work on current problems. He put an enormous amount of work into these efforts. I am not the right person to have any views on this, but I know that many applied economists thought the world of him.

I have been praising Terence, and his wonderful mind. I do not wish to sound like a hagiographer, and so I comment on his poorly developed sense of priorities. He would throw himself with complete concentration and determination into anything he was doing. So Faculty politics, a project to found a business school in England, the reading of all of the work of job applicants, of students seeking admission to graduate school, inevitably I was drawn into some of this, but I thought we were both not using our time most efficiently.

Now for anecdotes, but I only have time for two. The first concerns our joint deal with the L.S.E. Terence had bargained for his salary, I hadn't. We compared salaries early on in our stay, at lunch, and he rose like a pheasant from the table and raced to the Director. He told him that he would resign unless I got paid as much as he. It all worked.

Much of his best work was in his referee's reports. That way he ensured anonymity for his best ideas, and of course did not publish them. He figured in a footnote as a helpful referee. In his old age he recalled some of the occasions with, it seemed to me, some slight regret.

His wife Dorinda was outstandingly tolerant, as anyone living with him had to be. She undoubtedly provided an anchor, which held him to the world, and allowed him to flourish both intellectually and otherwise.



A.H. Halsey
Emeritus Professor of Sociology, and Emeritus Fellow,
Nuffield College.

Let me first speak for all of us in offering our admiration and condolence to Din Gorman, Terence's wife, who bore the burden of his illness, day in and day out over many years, and now faces bereavement with her characteristic cheerfulness and deeply Christian love.

You have been harangued by four economists and there are two more to come. Individually and collectively, and if there were time, they could expound the technicalities of mathematical economics to which Terence made such crucial and brilliant contributions. I can speak only for the rest of us, recognising that in our lifetime Economics has bestrode the social studies like a giant while we humble and diminutive sociologist and political scientists have peeped out from between the legs of this colossus, always looking for opportunities of early retirement. I can, however, offer a few valedictory if supplementary remarks.

First, I remember Terence in the 1950s as a young lecturer at Birmingham. He was a leprechaun, invented in Ireland as a pigmy sprite, now grown to a slim six feet and exported to England. He had heard, presumably from Frank Hahn, that Oxford was running a PPE degree and proposed that we turn this idea into a serious undergraduates course in Economics, Politics and Sociology, which we did. But Terence went further and persuaded us all to tutor in all three subjects in its first year. I therefore dutifully swotted up and expounded the long run equilibrium position of the firm under conditions of perfect competition, knowing that he would turn it all into impeccable algebra in the second year. But what, you might well ask, did he teach as sociology? I cannot give you a full answer but since he occupied the next room to mine, I did hear snatches of tutorial conversation through the flimsy walls of the portacabin in which we were housed under the eaves of the magnificent Aston-Webb Buildings. He seems to have decided that sociology was really European history but seen through the eyes of a loftily detached Chinese mandarin who dealt impatiently with the great wars of a barbarous continent called Christendom as if they were merely petty tribal conflicts. At the same time Terence wanted to express his love for Ireland, both Ulster and Eire. He was an all Ireland patriot. So he would illustrate his understanding of early 18th century struggles over the Spanish succession with a song learnt by all boys of his generation:-

Vive la for Ireland's right
And vive la for
Ireland's wrong

On Ramillies, that bloody field,
The baffled French were forced to yield:
The Victorious Saxons backward reeled
Before the charge of Clares' men

What the Birmingham students made of it I leave you to guess. But the experiment, in any case, was soon abandoned as the social science disciplines took their inevitable way towards more and more specialisation.

Terence came to an Oxford Chair in 1961 with a Fellowship in this College. I followed the next year. We were both busy and I remember little before he went off to LSE in 1967. Two incidents stick out. First, there was Terence in the Seminar Room with a distinguished visiting Japanese economist, Moroshima I think; neither could speak a word of the Queen's English. But they happily carried on an animated conversation on the blackboard with mathematical equations. Second, having driven him as usual to the railway station to catch the 8.56 to London, Din suddenly had a telegram from Terence. I AM ON DIDCOT PARKWAY STATION. WHERE SHOULD I BE? TERENCE.

Terence came back to Oxford in 1979 until he formally retired in 1990. He became seriously ill in the 90s and eventually had to go into a home where I visited him regularly. He always greeted me with the same shy, self-effacing smile, always wanted to know what I was up to academically. We would talk about the contents of the Guardian, which was his daily companion. A few days before he died we were celebrating the New Year. He remembered that we were both 79 years old and that 2003 would take us into our 80s. He looked forward to his 80th birthday but could not remember its date.

That was the last time I saw him. We walked along the corridor to his lunch passing a handsome portrait of Leonardo di Vinci's 'Last Supper' which he pointed out as usual. It suddenly occurred to me that the Jerusalem Society there depicted was a society overwhelmingly of young people. I wanted to ask Terence how an economist would compare such a society with our own. But his eyes were far away and he was leaning wearily on his walking stick. Next time perhaps. And then I saw in him old Simeon, the ancient Jewish elder, who bequeathed a prayer, which is familiar to Anglicans:-

'Now, lettest Thou thy servant depart in peace …..'

There was to be no next time. Terence died. Our world is a sadder place without him.



Robert Solow
Emeritus Professor of Economics, M.I.T.

My father was in the fur business for most of his adult life. In the 1930s and 40s the only job he could get was buying furs in the Soviet Union for a group of American furriers. In the course of this work he became the great expert on the Russian sable. The sable is a small animal, like a large weasel, with very dark fur. The use of the word 'sable' for 'black' comes from the color of the fur. Royalty used to dress up in 'ermine and sable.'

For their 25th wedding anniversary, my father procured for my mother a fur-piece of sable. Older people here may remember when women wore such things over their shoulders, a sort of scarf of pelts, with each animal's jaw clenched on the tail of the animal ahead, and its own tail clenched in the jaw of the animal behind. My father looked at the furs wistfully and murmured: 'I may be the only person in the world who knows just how good these skins really are.'

That is almost how I used to feel about Terence. Even back in the 1950s, I certainly was not the only economist to appreciate the power and subtlety of his mind--Frank Hahn did, and Paul Samuelson, and no doubt others--but it did take a certain connoisseurship to value him properly in those days. It did not help that his way of speaking was almost impenetrable to any native speaker of American English. It also did not help that his imagination and ingenuity were caught up in difficult, fundamental, very concrete, but fairly unfamiliar branches of economic theory, like the relation between the internal structure of preferences and observable patterns of demand, and like the formal analysis of the connection between individual decisions and macroscopic behavior, what we call the problem of aggregation.

Terence was most active just when the relation between expenditure functions and utility functions or between cost functions and production functions was being explored. It was an important innovation. He caught on to duality early, and what Terence touched, he mastered. But this part of economics is a minority taste. It is a classy minority; nevertheless you do not become widely famous that way. Even so, as the number of his former students and colleagues has accumulated, there is now much broader recognition of Terence's imaginativeness, depth and skill. Among the people whose opinions Terence would have cared about, there is no doubt about the extraordinary quality of his mind.

I once read a biography of the physicist J. Willard Gibbs, written by a poet. She noted sadly that Gibbs's pioneering work fell mostly on deaf ears. Apparently no one besides Clerk Maxwell is known to have valued it. But of course a word of admiration from Clerk Maxwell would have meant incomparably more to Gibbs than reams of praise from minor contemporaries. I don't know if economics has a Clerk Maxwell; if it does, he would surely have admired Terence.

Just to remind myself, I reread one of Terence's papers, the one on 'Measuring the Quantities of Fixed Factors' that appeared in a 1968 Festschrift for John Hicks. It is somewhat derivative of an earlier paper of Terence's, but I chose it because I have always been more interested in the production side of economics than the consumption side. Just as I expected, it is an intimidating demonstration of supreme prowess.

I don't mean that it is technically formidable, though I suppose it is; it picks its way through a daunting thicket of firms, outputs, inputs, factors, market prices and derived price indexes. That stuff may be necessary to get the formal job done, but it is not sufficient to make a top-notch paper. What really does it is that a clear and deep intuition drives the reasoning. Terence obviously saw what had to be true. The rest is 'merely' finding a rigorous way to get there.

The purity of Terence's vision is splendid and, for less gifted economists, maybe off-putting. For someone like me, who thinks that economics is much more about approximations than about theorems, it may sometimes seem too demanding, though I am pretty sure that Terence himself understood this problem and would have liked to avoid it. I think he was interested even in casual observations, but was led from irresistibly them to flights of theory.

He could be scary sometimes, intelligence incarnate. Years ago, probably in the 1960s, I was invited by John Hicks to give a lecture at All Souls. Terence was there. For reasons I can no longer remember, maybe just to tease John Hicks, I decided to give a tongue-in-cheek talk, I think a mock-serious connection between attitudes toward risk and attitudes toward cross-sectional wealth- inequality, complete with 'policy implications.' Terence described it to someone as a 'tour de farce.' Then I began to worry. Did he by any chance think that I took it all seriously? In that case he would never again take me seriously? Or did he understand that I would take his description as a compliment? I never dared to ask, and now I will never know.

I hope Terence knew how we all felt about him. He was so good at what he did, and so genuine a person, that to envy him seemed irrelevant.



Christopher Bliss
Nuffield Professor of International Economics,
Nuffield College

All those who have spoken before me have talked of Terence as a great economist. And that he was such is unquestionably the case. Yet the description leaves me dissatisfied. It feels somewhat like saying that Napoleon was a man of small stature; a proposition indubitably correct, yet very far from being the most interesting thing that one can say about the individual concerned. A more important truth is that Terence was a philosopher, a deep deep thinker, and a man to whose thought the term 'penetrating' really applies. Penetrating is a term that trips easily off the tongue, yet Terence shows what it really means. It is the ability to go deeper and to keep on tunnelling long after others would have given up. I will shortly discuss an example of this from Terence's work.

Clontarf Revisited has been mentioned. I have it here. It is so short that I could read it all, though two extracts will serve my purpose. I start with the background. A paper by Terence on aggregation drew from Professor Karl Vind a sharp comment in which he claimed that a key result of Debreu's had not been cited. Terence responded in the mildest terms, but while confessing to fault, he suggested moderate amendments to Vind's account of the issues. It was the basis for a ceasefire agreement. However Professor Vind did not want a ceasefire; he wanted unconditional surrender, as his further response made clear. Terence did not disguise his exasperation.

'Now I know how the Irish scholar monks felt as they crouched in their round towers while the Danes rampaged below, burning their books. Observe Professor Vind with his double-headed axe, chastising me with one blade for not using an argument in my apologia which, so far as it spells it out, is precisely that in the lemma he criticises, and cutting the tail off my closing sentence with the other.'

Later in the same piece, Terence as a superstar Absent-minded Professor:
'To make matters worse, I now learn that a referee, whose comments I promptly lost, made exactly the same point as Professor Vind. If, as I strongly suspect, he was Professor Vind, I can well understand his martial mood, and I am grateful that it is directed against such a small part of my paper.'

I am inclined to think that the wonderful self-portrait that Terence gives us in the Clontarf piece is good for more than just the skirmish with Karl Vind. Terence must have felt on numerous occasions like an Irish scholar monk watching savages burning his books. The Danes were economist colleagues above all, and others also, including a one-time Warden of this college. The scholar monk feels besieged but also distinctly superior, as operating on a higher level than the rude mob around. It is impossible to be as good as Terence without knowing how good you are, and when Terence offered cutting insights and comments as if they were trivial and obvious, he cannot always have failed to appreciate that he was in a higher gear than everyone else on the track.

Iowa eggs have been mentioned and they can well illustrate the elevated level from which Terence was forced to view his colleagues. He was visiting the State University of Iowa in the 1950s, when the department received a visit from a local bigwig. This character was shown around and what the department was doing was explained to him. It left him singularly unimpressed. In a closing address he told the department: 'What you guys should be working on is why Iowa eggs command such a low price'. It seemed obvious to Terence why this should be so, because Iowa eggs are of low quality. Most of us would have arrived quickly at the same conclusion and left it there. High supply, low demand, means a low price. In the Foundations of Economic Analysis Paul Samuelson writes:
'If this were all that economists had to offer they would be parrots taught to say supply and demand.'

Sadly most of us are parrots most of the time. But Terence was never a parrot. He thought more deeply and saw that a simple supply and demand account cannot work. There is no such thing as demand for Iowa eggs. We do not go into a New York diner and say, 'Give me an Iowa egg sunny side up'. If there is no demand for eggs by source as such, how are we to treat the market for eggs? What matters is quality, measured by a relatively small number of variables (freshness, flavour, colour, etc.). Terence had invented (discovered?) the characteristics approach to demand theory.

I am not certain who first used this approach. In the 1950s Dick Stone at the DAE in Cambridge modelled the demand for alcoholic beverages in the UK based on two leading variables: alcohol, with a positive weight, and liquid volume, with a negative weight. So full-strength vodka is great, and near-beer is awful. Terence saw the generality and power of this method. What is certain is that Kelvin Lancaster, whose name is most frequently associated with the model, is not its inventor.

It is a tired cliché to say on an occasion like this: 'We shall not see his like again'. In truth we are all completely unique, and not one of us will or could be replaced by anyone closely similar. Yet in mourning the loss of Terence I feel the passing of a generation of economists, from which Terence was a golden peak. They belong to a time when economics was far less professionalized than it is today, when graduate teaching was haphazard, and when there were only a few books worth reading. It is always a mistake to recall the past in fond nostalgic terms. There was a big downside to that amateurish and disordered organization of economics. How often one encountered tiresome people who thought that they knew everything, and who in truth had never received a basic training in the discipline. Even so, the changes that have scythed away the bottom have also flattened the top. When economists came to the subject little equipped by training, putting to work whatever they had, and casting the subject as they saw fit; then those who brought genius could do miraculous things. What could then happen is demonstrated by Terence's life. A cause for joy and celebration, and something never to be imitated.


Given below are some obituaries published in various newspapers and mailbases. Note that all record the date of Terence's death incorrectly. We thank Dorinda Gorman for pointing this out to us.


Obituary posted to the Econometric Society mailbase

22 January 2003

W.M. (Terence) Gorman passed away on Sunday 12 January 2003. Terence was one of the most distinguished economists of the twentieth century. He served as president of the Econometric Society in 1972. He was elected a Fellow in 1961 along with five other Fellows: de Finetti, F. Hahn, H. Kuhn and R. Radner. He served on the Council 1968-70, 1974-79 and again from 1984-86. He graduated from Trinity College, Dublin in 1948 in Economics and in 1949 in Mathematics. From 1949 to 1962 he taught at the University of Birmingham. He held Chairs in Economics at Oxford from 1962-67 and at the London School of Economics from 1967-79 after which he returned to Nuffield College Oxford as a Official Fellow where he remained until his retirement. From 1986-96 he was also Visiting Professor at University College London. Honorary Doctorates have been conferred upon him by the University of Southampton, the University of Birmingham, the National University of Ireland and University College London. He was a Fellow of the British Academy, and honorary Fellow of Trinity College Dublin and of the London School of Economics, an honorary foreign member of the American Economic Association.

Terence had a lasting impact on all who met him. He was fiercely intelligent with an extraordinary imagination; challenging yet fun to be around. He was one of the principle architects of modern consumer theory. His ideas are so ingrained in modern economics that we use them daily with almost no acknowledgement. Two aspects of economics particularly concerned him. First was the relationship between individual behavior and aggregate outcomes. Gorman was the first to develop a systematic framework to explore the link between micro and macro relationships in economics. His first, and still unpublished, paper was written in the summer of 1949 to provide an answer to a question posed about macro-economic models and their micro-economic foundations that had been posed by Lawrence Klein. When Terence returned from his summer holidays he was dismayed to discover that an essentially identical paper had just been published in Econometrica by Nataf. His first published paper was also on this subject and appeared in Econometrica in 1953. There, he established the necessary and sufficient conditions under which a community of individuals could be said to have preferences. This paper was original, elegant and important; it is still widely cited today. His second major area of contributions was the understanding of individual decisions themselves. He began from the observation that the kinds of decisions that individuals make are enormously complicated and that economics, as a science, needs to find a simple, yet reasonable representation of individual actions. He formulated the idea that decisions might be considered in two stages - first making choices over broad categories (such as food, housing and clothing) and then making more detailed allocations. Pretty much every economic study of demand undertaken today is explicitly or implicitly taking advantage of Gorman's insights.

A key feature of his approach to economics was to begin from casual observation and work towards a far-reaching and elegant theory that could be applied to a wide variety of circumstances. Thus, his path-breaking work that reformulated the theory of the consumer in terms of a set of underlying 'characteristics' began as study of a desire to understand quality differentials in the egg market. However, it is now appreciated that comparisons across the bewildering array of consumer goods in the majority of markets can be made manageable by thinking of them via their characteristics.

Not only was Terence an active and innovative economist but he was also a dedicated teacher and mentor to students and junior colleagues. He was generous with his time and valuable time it was. More than one discussion with Terence appeared later as a scholarly article inspired by that conversation. A chat with Terence could be intimidating as well amusing. On a walk from their country cottage to a local pub, Terence and a young colleague were chatting and Terence made a claim about separability that the young colleague knew to be incorrect but said that he could not remember why. Terence responded by saying that when I say 'dit' I mean the derivative with respect to utility, when I say 'dot' or 'dash' I mean a derivative with respect to a price. He then proceeded to deliver several minutes of Morse code that seemed completely incomprehensible, and finally said, 'you are right, you are absolutely brilliant'. The young colleague had not understood a thing except a pretty clear demonstration of who was brilliant.

Personally Terence was charming and amusing; it addition he may have been the most absent-minded person in the world. Everyone who knew him had at least one story about his absent-mindedness that seemed more unbelievably than the last. He will be missed but his written works remains to remind all of us that we are sitting on the shoulders of a giant.

Tim Besley
Charles Blackorby
Richard Blundell


Newspaper Obituaries

Copyright 2003 Guardian Newspapers Limited
The Guardian (
London)


January 31, 2003

SECTION: Guardian Leader Pages, Pg. 26

HEADLINE: Obituary: Terence Gorman: Distinguished economist whose insights shaped the study of modern consumer behaviour

BYLINE: Tim Besley, Charles Black-orby and Richard Blundell


WM 'Terence' Gorman, who has died aged 79, was one of the most distinguished economists of the 20th century. An architect of modern consumer theory, his ideas are so ingrained in modern economics that we use them daily with almost no acknowledgement. He provided a range of important practical and theoretical insights into consumer behaviour, and, for more than 50 years, guided both students and colleagues in how to model economic activities - and how to test those models once formulated.

Gorman was raised by his mother in Kesh, County Fermanagh. His father, a veterinarian, died when he was still a boy. Educated at Mount Temple school, Dublin, and Foyle College, Derry, he grad- uated from Trinity College, Dublin, in 1948 with a degree in economics, and a year later in mathematics. From 1949 to 1962, he taught in the commerce faculty at Birmingham University, going on to hold chairs in economics at Oxford (1962-67) and at the London School of Economics (1967-79). He then returned, as an official fellow, to Nuffield College, Oxford, where he remained until retirement. He received honorary doctorates from Southampton and Birmingham universities, the National University of Ireland and University College London, where he was visiting professor (1986-96). He was a fellow of the British Academy; an honorary fellow of Trinity College, Dublin, and of the LSE; and an honorary foreign member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and of the American Economic Association. In 1972, he served as president of the Econometric Society.

Gorman was one of a small number of postwar economists to emphasise the use of quantitative methods in economic reasoning, but, unlike many of his contemporaries, he insisted that theories and their applications made common sense. Two aspects of economics particularly concerned him.

The first was the relationship between individual behaviour and aggregate outcomes. Although much of economics is about the study of aggregates - unemployment, GDP, saving, etc - these are the product of underlying individual decisions. Gorman was the first to develop a systematic framework to explore the link between these micro and macro relationships. His first published paper was on the subject, and appeared in Econometrica in 1953. There, he established the necessary and sufficient conditions under which a community of individuals could be said to have preferences. An original, elegant and important paper, it is still widely cited today.

Gorman's second contribution was to increase our understanding of individual decisions themselves. He began from the observation that the kinds of decisions that individuals make are enormously complicated, and that economics, as a science, needs to find a simple, yet reasonable, representation of individual actions. He formulated the idea that decisions might be considered in two stages - first making choices over broad categories (such as food, housing and clothing), and then making more detailed allocations. Pretty much every economic study of demand undertaken today is explicitly or implicitly taking advantage of Gorman's insights.

A key feature of his ap proach was to begin from casual observation and work towards a far-reaching and elegant theory that could be applied to a wide variety of circumstances. Thus, his path-breaking work that reformulated the theory of the consumer in terms of a set of underlying 'characteristics' began as a desire to understand quality differentials in the egg market.

Gorman's work has also had an impact in policy analyses involving comparisons of income distribution. Any effort to engage in serious analysis of distribution runs up against the problem of making comparisons across different types of families. How, for example, is a family of two adults and one child to be compared with one that has one adult and two children? He developed a conceptual framework for 'adult equivalence scales', which still forms the backbone of our understanding of these issues.

Gorman was also a dedicated teacher and mentor to students and junior colleagues, though a chat with him could be intimidating as well as amusing. Once, while walking from his country cottage to a local pub with a young colleague, he made a claim about separability that the colleague knew to be incorrect, but said that he could not remember why.

Gorman responded by saying that when he said 'dit' he meant the derivative with respect to utility, but that when he said 'dot' or 'dash' he meant a derivative with respect to a price. He then proceeded to deliver several minutes of apparently incomprehensible Morse code, finally observing, 'You are right, you are absolutely brilliant.' The young colleague had not understood a thing, except a pretty clear demonstration of who was brilliant.

Personally, Gorman was charming and entertaining; everyone who knew him also had at least one story about his absent-mindedness. He will be missed, but his written works remain to remind all of us that we are sitting on the shoulders of a giant.

He is survived by his wife Din, whom he met while studying at Trinity College, Dublin.

William Moore 'Terence' Gorman, economist, born June 17 1923; died January 12 2003


Copyright 2003 The Irish Times
The Irish Times


February 1, 2003

SECTION: CITY EDITION; OBITUARIES; TERENCE GORMAN; Pg. 16

HEADLINE: Probably the greatest Irish economist of his generation


Terence Gorman, who died in
Oxford recently in his 80th year and whose generosity of spirit and absent-minded enthusiasms infected all who met him, was undoubtedly the greatest Irish economist of his generation.

Although his professional contributions were often forbiddingly technical, they were always driven by simple insights and down-to-earth questions. 'A penny bun costs thruppence if you've got a wife and a child' was, for example, a characteristic aphorism he used to motivate subtle analysis of household consumption behaviour. One of his most widely used and far-reaching theoretical insights was published in a paper with the disarming title: 'A possible procedure for analysing quality differentials in the egg market.' Born William Gorman in Kesh, Co Fermanagh, in 1923, he spent part of his childhood in Rhodesia. He loved to recount how his African nanny, rejecting William as a not very Irish name, rechristened him Terence, by which he was thereafter universally known.

He graduated from Trinity College Dublin in economics in 1948 and in mathematics in 1949 and spent his career in the leading British university economics departments of the day: Birmingham in the 1950s, Oxford in the 1960s and again after he retired from a professorship at the London School of Economics in 1979. His position at the pinnacle of his profession is confirmed by his election to the presidency of the Econometric Society in 1972.

Terence was an enthusiastic mentor of graduate students, who appreciated his open invitation to a sherry party in his office after the weekly seminar. His ability to penetrate quickly to the heart of an argument made his participation in these seminars a delight to witness. Time and again he would gently and apologetically expose fatal flaws and hidden arbitrary assumptions in the presentations of visiting academics. Generations of his students thus learnt to develop and communicate a no-nonsense approach to reasoning and evidence.

His students however also complained that they could rarely understand his lectures. Unaware of the need to explain intermediate steps in his thinking and assuming the listener's grasp of the previous literature was as wide as his own, these lectures became something of a mystery tour. Perhaps he was aware of this and considered it no great flaw, as he was known to have pointed to a promising graduate student as having had the inestimable advantage of being poorly taught as an undergraduate and thus having had to think for himself.

Thinking for himself helped Terence to produce intellectual contributions which were fundamental and far-reaching in their application. In addition to those which had appeared over the years in the profession's leading journals, his Collected Papers, published in 1995, included many important articles which Terence had either regarded as too obvious to publish or left as incomplete drafts, which for years circulated influentially only in mimeographed form.

Much of his work reflected a determination to bridge the gap between theoretical descriptions of economic behaviour and the practical analysis of real-world data. Is it possible to talk about labour and capital when there are many different types of worker and of capital goods? Can aggregate national data be used to explain the behaviour of individuals? Can the degree of substitutability of some goods be measured without knowing the prices of other goods? These were some of the questions which he addressed and to which, in many cases, he provided the settled answers. The 'egg' paper was the first to show how the relative price of a large number of similar but not identical goods could be analysed in terms of a few underlying unmeasured characteristics (such as taste, style, comfort), an insight which underpins much of the modern theory of financial asset pricing.

Much more than a lovable eccentric, Terence Gorman built, in his quiet way, the rigorous foundations of many of the most widely used analytical tools in economics today. Although little known to the public here, among his many honours were an honorary fellowship from TCD and an honorary doctorate from the NUI. He and his wife Dorinda, who survives him, retained strong links to Ireland, latterly spending part of the year in Co Cork.

W. M. Gorman: born June 17th, 1923, died January 12th, 2003


Copyright 2003 Times Newspapers Limited
The Times (
London)


February 5, 2003, Wednesday

SECTION: Features; 30

HEADLINE: Terence Gorman


Professor W. M. Gorman, FBA, economist, was born on
June 17, 1923. He died in Oxford on January 12, 2003, aged 79.

Economic theorist whose application of mathematics to individual behaviour shaped modern marketing.

TERENCE GORMAN'S application of mathematics to the study of individual behaviour had a lasting influence on both theoretical and applied economics. His writings were exclusively theoretical and forbiddingly technical, yet they have been widely influential in marketing as well as economics. For instance, he propounded the view that consumers care about a relatively small number of characteristics (speed, comfort and so on, in the case of motor cars, for example), rather than about the many thousands of individual products which embody these characteristics.

He also clarified the implications of recognising that household composition influences behaviour, so that a household of three adults behaves very differently from one with two adults and a child, not merely in the level and composition of spending but in its responses to changes in prices and income.

Although he was a legend to fellow economists, Gorman neither dabbled in academic politics nor participated in policy debates, so his name was not much before the general public. A rare exception came when a disciple, temporarily seconded to a senior post in the US Administration, was asked unexpectedly at a press conference to name the best economist in the world and unhesitatingly cited Gorman.

Among his many fundamental contributions, he clarified the conditions required to allow individual behaviour to be validly deduced from aggregate observations, and derived the most general mathematical expression for consumer preferences which permit consistent aggregation from the individual to the group level (now known as the 'Gorman polar form').

He also wrote extensively on the problem of aggregation, which attracted much attention in the 1960s as the focus of an often bitter debate between 'the two Cambridges' (in England and Massachusetts) on the possibility of constructing a measure of a country's aggregate capital stock. Characteristically, Gorman did not participate directly in the debate but methodically derived the necessary and sufficient conditions for an aggregate measure of 'capital' to exist.

The editors of his Collected Works wisely added extensive glosses to explain the technical aspects, even to today's mathematically trained economists. Yet he was always motivated by practical concerns; the mathematical tools he developed have helped to simplify both teaching and research; and his work has been enormously influential in guiding econometric methodology worldwide.

William Moore Gorman was born in Co Fermanagh in 1923, and spent some of his childhood in southern Africa. Apparently it was his African nursemaid who decided that William was an insufficiently Irish name and called him Terence instead.

Back in Ireland he attended Mount Temple College in Dublin and Foyle College in Londonderry before going up to Trinity College Dublin. He served as a rating and then a petty officer in the Royal Navy from 1943 to 1946, and then returned to Trinity where he graduated in economics in 1948 and in mathematics in 1949. He then taught at Birmingham University until 1962.

He held chairs in economics at Oxford from 1962 to 1967 and at the London School of Economics from 1967 to 1979. In 1979 he returned to Oxford as a Fellow of Nuffield College. He also spent periods as a visiting professor at several American universities, including Johns Hopkins and Stanford. Gorman served as president of the Econometric Society in 1972 (one of the foremost academic honours in economics), and received numerous honorary doctorates. He was a Fellow of the British Academy, a member of Academia Europaea, and an honorary foreign member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and the American Economic Association.

Students sometimes found him forbidding at first, with his incomprehensible Fermanagh accent, impenetrable mathematics and eccentricities. But they soon learnt that his kindliness was genuine, while his demeanour of absent-minded professor was merely a gloss on a rapier-sharp intellect which was entirely democratic in its application: no colleague or visitor, irrespective of reputation, was immune from penetrating queries. He was rewarded with enormous loyalty and affection by his students, and it is largely through his and their influence that British universities retain a worldwide reputation in the economics and econometrics of individual behaviour.

In 1950 Gorman married Dorinda (Din) Scott, whom he had met at Trinity. She survives him.

Copyright 2003 Times Newspapers Limited
The Times (
London)


February 7, 2003, Friday

SECTION: Features; 43

HEADLINE: Terence Gorman


A. Severn writes: In 1950, as a young undergraduate at
Birmingham University, I was exposed to the arcane subject of statistics as expounded by Terence Gorman (obituary, February 5). It was certainly impenetrable -and not just to me with the result that, after a dismal showing in examinations, a number of us weaker brethren were invited to extra tutorials. In this smaller group, under the influence of Gorman's tolerant kindliness to the benighted, a Damascene conversion came upon me (if not upon others). I would never claim to have become a statistician as a result, but fond memories of Terence Gorman's patience and humanity were evoked by your obituary.


Copyright 2003 The Financial Times Limited
Financial Times (
London)


February 12, 2003, Wednesday London Edition 1

SECTION: INSIDE TRACK; Pg. 12

HEADLINE: Architect of modern economics: OBITUARY W.M. (TERENCE) GORMAN: The clever and engaging Terence Gorman made an immense contribution to the way economists think about consumer decision-making, writesRichard Blundell:

BYLINE: By RICHARD BLUNDELL


Terence Gorman was one of a small number of distinguished 20th-century academics who changed economics. Wonderfully clever and engaging, he featured on many shortlists for the Nobel Prize in economics and was highly influential on the work of many Nobel prizewinners. Although his ideas are at work in many day-to-day economic analyses, he remained largely unknown to most economists outside academia.

Gorman was one of the foremost creators of modern consumer economics. He made four important contributions to the way economists think about consumer decision-making, any one of which would place him in the economics hall of fame. His interest in consumer behaviour seems to have begun with his undergraduate thesis at Trinity College, Dublin, in 1948, on the demand for tomatoes. Subsequently he realised that the huge range of products available meant systematic analysis of consumer behaviour would be swamped in detail and no broad concepts would be recoverable. So the 'characteristics approach' to consumer behaviour was born.

In the late 1950s, while teaching at the University of Birmingham, Gorman undertook an exchange with agricultural researchers in Iowa. While researching quality differentials in the egg market, he developed his method of looking at commodities in terms of a relatively small number of underlying characteristics. For example, a food product may be thought of in terms of nutrition, colour, and so on. He realised that if utility depended just on these characteristics, this theory could explain why consumers bought only a limited set of commodities. It could explain the demand for new goods, now thought of as a new bundle of the same underlying characteristics; a new computer model defined by a faster processor.

This idea is now a mainstay of modern consumer theory, used extensively in industrial economics.

In the 1960s, Gorman also developed the idea of 'two-stage budgeting' to simplify consumer decision-making. He asked the question: when is it possible to simplify decision-making across broad groups of commodities so that choices in one group can be made with only limited information about choices in others?

Two-stage budgeting is now commonplace in the way economists envisage consumer decisions across a wide range of markets, from fruit and vegetables to assets. As with Gorman's work on characteristics, he developed a new concept to match the decision-making process of consumers but also help the analyst to make sense of the market.

Gorman's third contribution to economics was the notion of adult equivalence scales as a method of comparing households.

Part of the stock in trade of microeconomic policy analysis is to examine the distributional consequences of policy reforms. For instance, would a proposed tax reform lift more families out of poverty? Would it reduce inequality? The answers require households of different types to be compared. Gorman came up a way to 'equivalise' families of different sizes.

His solution is to think of the minimum income required to achieve a level of well-being, then consider the amount that income needs to be shifted to achieve the same level of well-being for another family of a different composition. Gorman noted that because children consume different bundles of goods from those of adults, this adjustment will differ when prices change. And he worked out a consistent way of dealing with this.

Last, he provided an extensive methodology for linking macro- and micro-relations in economic behaviour.

How easy is it to predict the way aggregate durable expenditure changes with growth in national income? Gorman showed the conditions under which such a stable aggregate relationship would hold. Indeed, this was some of his first work, published in the 1950s. The conditions he derived turned out to be strong indeed and unlikely to be satisfied, especially in periods of changing income distribution.

Gorman was born in Kesh, Co Fermanagh, in 1923 and raised by his mother - his father, a veterinarian, died when he was young. He was educated at Raphoe Royal School and went to Trinity College, Dublin, in 1941. From 1943 to 1946 he was in the Royal Navy and he graduated from Trinity in 1948 in economics and in 1949 in mathematics. While at Trinity he met his wife Din.

From 1949 to 1962 he taught in the commerce faculty at the University of Birmingham. He held chairs in economics at Oxford in 1962-67 and London School of Economics in 1967-79, after which he returned to Nuffield College Oxford, as a official fellow, where he remained until his retirement. From 1986 to 1996 he was also visiting professor at University College London.

Honorary doctorates were conferred on him by the universities of Southampton and Birmingham, the National University of Ireland and University College London. He was a fellow of the British Academy and honorary fellow of Trinity College Dublin and of the LSE, an honorary foreign member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and of the American Economic Association. He was a fellow of the Econometric Society and served as its president in 1972.

Gorman was infuriatingly stubborn, yet endearing. Notoriously absent-minded, he never really understood that many people - even trained economists - have difficulty conceptualising economic phenomena in mathematical terms. In many ways he was the epitome of an ivory-tower academic - but for the best possible reasons.

Once, when I was doing my stint as chair of the economics department at UCL, he arrived to find me in a meeting with the then vice-provost. It was a hot summer day in London and he had just arrived on the coach from Oxford. Exasperated by the lack of intellectual discussion, he proceeded to remove his rather sweaty shirt and hang it on the radiator behind my esteemed guests from the administrative hierarchy. The meeting came to a speedy conclusion, exactly as he intended.

In many ways he was right; it is all too easy for academics to forget they should be pushing frontiers and not paper. Economics has lost one of its most original and endearing characters.

The writer is Leverhulme research professor at University College London and research director at the Institute for Fiscal Studies, London


Copyright 2003 Editrice Il Sole 24 Ore S.p.A.
Il Sole 24 Ore


February 14, 2003

SECTION: COMMENTI E INCHIESTE; Pg. 10

HEADLINE: Economisti;
Gorman, consumatori senza segreti

BYLINE: Nicola Rossi

HIGHLIGHT: Ricordo dell'innovativo studioso britannico, recentemente scomparso


DI NICOLA ROSSI

Si farebbe fatica a trovare un articolo di giornale o una intervista di Terence Gorman, il grande economista britannico recentemente scomparso. Cosi' come si farebbe fatica a trovarne posizioni pubbliche su questo o quel tema di politica economica.

Terence Gorman era infatti un accademico e un teorico nel senso piu' proprio del termine, capace di estrarre da piccoli problemi concreti indicazioni di carattere generale di profondita' a volte straordinaria. E non e' un caso che il lavoro teorico di Terence Gorman - pressoche' interamente concentrato nel campo della teoria del consumatore - abbia consentito una vastissima quantita' di lavoro applicato anche nell'ambito della politica economica. Dall'attivita' di consumo interpretata come combinazione di caratteristiche elementari contenute in beni diversi (che ci consente di capire il passaggio dal consumo di prodotti elementari a quello di prodotti complessi come, ad esempio, i cibi pronti o i viaggi 'tutto compreso') alle modalita' di comparazione fra livelli di benessere di famiglie di diversa dimensione e caratteristiche (che ha portato alle scale di equivalenza adottate dalla legislazione italiana fin dalla seconda meta' degli anni Ottanta), all'importanza delle abitudini (e anche dei fenomeni di assuefazione) nelle scelte dei consumatori; dalle condizioni che consentono l'aggregazione fra beni (e quindi la possibilita' per i consumatori di scegliere con riferimento non gia' a singoli beni ma a gruppi di beni) alle condizioni che permettono di ipotizzare l'esistenza di un aggregato di consumatori (e quindi la possibilita' di un legame esplicito fra micro e macroeconomia), sono tanti i campi che portano il segno della grande intelligenza e fantasia di Terence Gorman, arrivato piu' volte negli anni passati alla soglia del Nobel.

Ma al di la' delle sue illuminanti intuizioni, rimane di Gorman l'immagine di un ricercatore straordinariamente innovativo, capace come pochi di combinare la logica economica con lo strumento matematico ed autore di lavori di grande importanza, rimasti per anni in forma manoscritta e con una circolazione limitata a pochissimi conoscenti.

Cosi' come rimane di lui il ricordo di un docente assolutamente sui generis, capace di portare i suoi allievi li' dove questi mai avrebbero pensato di arrivare e, al tempo stesso, capace di cambiare improvvisamente notazione matematica nel bel mezzo della lezione e di stupirsi poi nel leggere lo sconcerto sui volti degli stessi allievi. Quasi a dare consistenza fisica a una delle sue affermazioni preferite: <Il processo di accumulazione della conoscenza e' spesso tanto importante quanto la conoscenza stessa>.