Arthur Lyon Bowley

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Arthur Lyon Bowley
Born6 November 1869
CBE (1937) Guy Medal (silver, 1895) (Gold, 1935)
Scientific career
FieldsStatistics, Economics
InstitutionsLondon School of Economics University College London

Sir Arthur Lyon Bowley, FBA (6 November 1869 – 21 January 1957) was an English statistician and economist[1][2] who worked on economic statistics and pioneered the use of sampling techniques in social surveys.

Early life

Bowley's father, James William Lyon Bowley, was a minister in the Church of England. He died at the age of 40 when Arthur was one, leaving Arthur's mother as mother or stepmother to seven children. Arthur was educated at Christ's Hospital, and won a scholarship to Trinity College, Cambridge to study mathematics.[3] He graduated as Tenth Wrangler.[3]

At Cambridge Bowley had a short course of study with the economist Alfred Marshall who had also been a Cambridge wrangler.[clarification needed] Under Marshall's influence Bowley became an economic statistician. His Account of England's Foreign Trade won the Cobden Essay Prize and was published as a book. Marshall watched over Bowley's career, recommending him for jobs and offering him advice. Most notoriously Marshall told him the Elements of Statistics contained "too much mathematics."[4]

Academic career

After leaving Cambridge Bowley taught mathematics at

Josiah Stamp worked "nominally" under Bowley's supervision. [11]

Bowley produced a stream of studies of British economic statistics, beginning in the 1890s with work on trade and on wages and income. His 1900 publication Wages in the United Kingdom in the Nineteenth Century was created using the unpaid assistance of

Seebohm Rowntree's "Poverty, A Study of Town Life" (1901). The methodological innovation was the use of sampling techniques. Bowley gave a detailed exposition of his approach to sampling in a 62-page paper published in 1926. The culmination of Bowley's work on social surveys was the monumental New Survey of London Life and Labour. Even in the 1930s his research could take a new direction, as when he collaborated with his junior colleague R. G. D. Allen on an econometric study of family expenditure.[13]
He retired in 1936 but served as acting Director of the Oxford University Institute of Statistics during the Second World War.

Books

Bowley's "Elements of Statistics"[14] is generally regarded as the first English-language statistics text-book [by whom?]. It described the techniques of descriptive statistics that would be useful for economists and social sciences, and in the early editions contained little statistical theory.

In statistical theory Bowley was not an innovator but drew on the writings of Karl Pearson, Udny Yule and F. Y. Edgeworth. In the 1930s, Bowley informed Fisher that "Professor Edgeworth had written a great deal on a kindred subject" and slapping Neyman down with "I am not at all sure that the 'confidence' [in confidence interval] is not a 'confidence trick.'"[15]

Bowley's teaching presaged several of the

boxplots, the seven-figure summary and trimean.[citation needed
]

Bowley's '"The Mathematical Groundwork of Economics'"[16][17] was a notable attempt to provide the practising economist with the main ideas and techniques of mathematical economics; it was the first book in English of its kind. One of its successes was to bring the Edgeworth box to the attention of economists generally. Bowley was so successful that this is often referred to as the "Edgeworth-Bowley box". He also introduced the concept of conjectural variation into the theory of oligopoly in this book.

Honours

Bowley received many honours. In 1922, he became

CBE in 1937 [18] and knighted in 1950. He served on the council of the Royal Economic Society and was president of the Econometric Society 1938–9. The Royal Statistical Society awarded him its Guy Medal in Gold in 1935 and he served as its president 1938–40.[19]

Personal life

According to Allen and George, "In personality Bowley was somewhat shy and retiring. He did not readily make friends and his close friendship with

Francis Edgeworth. When Edgeworth wanted to discuss a mathematical question Cannan said, "Bowley, let us go a little faster, Edgeworth cannot talk mathematics at more than eight miles an hour."[citation needed
]

Bowley married Julia Hilliam in 1904 and the couple had three daughters.[1] His daughter, Marian Bowley, also had an academic career in economics.[20]

Bowley's law

Bowley formulated

GNP
from labour is constant.

Main publications of A. L. Bowley

Discussions

  • Journal of the Royal Statistical Society, Series A
    . 102: 236–241.
  • W F Maunder and Sir Arthur Lyon Bowley (1869–1957) in Studies in the History of Statistics Probability, (ed. E S Pearson and M G Kendall) 1970. London: Griffin.
  • Darnell, A. (1981), "A.L. Bowley, 1969-1957", in O'Brien, D. P.; Presley, J. R. (eds.), Pioneers of Modern Economics in Britain, London: Macmillan, pp. 140–174,
    ISBN 9780333231753
    .
  • Bowley, Arthur Lyon, pp. 277–9 in Leading Personalities in Statistical Sciences from the Seventeenth Century to the Present, (ed. N. L. Johnson and S. Kotz) 1997. New York: Wiley. Originally published in Encyclopedia of Statistical Science.

See also

References

  1. ^ a b c "Sir Arthur Bowley". The Times. No. 53746. London. 23 January 1957. p. 12.
  2. ^ "Bowley, Arthur Lyon". Who's Who. 59: 196. 1907.
  3. ^ a b "Bowley, Arthur Lyon (BWLY887AL)". A Cambridge Alumni Database. University of Cambridge.
  4. ^ Darnell (1981), p. 141.
  5. doi:10.1080/01621459.1935.10503303
    .
  6. JSTOR 2343496
    .
  7. ISBN 978-0-19-954145-4
    .
  8. ^ Benjamin, Bernard (1970). "R. F. George (obituary)". Journal of the Royal Statistical Society. Series A. 133 (1): 128–129.
  9. ^ Morrell, A. J. H. (1965). "L. R. Connor(obituary)". Journal of the Royal Statistical Society. Series A. 128 (1): 162.
  10. S2CID 252533061
    .
  11. ^ Bowley, A. L. (1941). "Lord Stamp (obituary)". Journal of the Royal Statistical Society. 104 (2): 193–196.
  12. doi:10.1093/ref:odnb/48586. Retrieved 29 October 2020. (Subscription or UK public library membership
    required.)
  13. ^ Darnell (1981), p. 159: "Bowley's major contribution to econometrics was the path-breaking text Family Expenditure (1935) which he wrote in collaboration with R. G. D. Allen".
  14. S2CID 190139505
    .
  15. ^ Darnell (1981), p. 165.
  16. JSTOR 2222651
    .
  17. doi:10.1090/s0002-9904-1925-04111-7
    .
  18. ^ "No. 34396". The London Gazette (Supplement). 11 May 1937. pp. 3073–3106.
  19. ^ "Royal Statistical Society Presidents". Royal Statistical Society. Archived from the original on 17 March 2012. Retrieved 6 August 2010.
  20. ISBN 9781848444973
    , Marian Bowley was as rigorous and demanding a scholar as I imagine her father – Sir Arthur Bowley, the father of economic statistics and Professor of Economics at University College Reading between 1907 and 1919 – must have been.

External links

Wikisource has original works by or about:
Arthur Lyon Bowley

The New School entry has a photograph. There is another at

In the 4th edition of the Elements (1920) Bowley gave a lot more space to statistical theory. The following excerpt illustrates his approach

This was written just before Bowley got involved in the controversy between Fisher and Pearson on chi-squared. In the fifth edition (1926) Bowley added a reference to his own contribution.

For Bowley's contribution to sampling theory put in historical perspective see

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