Johannes de Villiers Graaff (also known as Jan de Van Graaff or Jannie Graaff) (19 February 1928 – 6 January 2015) was a
neoclassical South African
welfare economist. Graaff is noted for his work on optimal savings rates, contributions to the creation of the
social welfare function
In welfare economics, a social welfare function is a function that ranks social states (alternative complete descriptions of the society) as less desirable, more desirable, or indifferent for every possible pair of social states. Inputs of the f ...
and for his 1957
magnum opus
A masterpiece, ''magnum opus'' (), or ''chef-d’œuvre'' (; ; ) in modern use is a creation that has been given much critical praise, especially one that is considered the greatest work of a person's career or a work of outstanding creativity, ...
''Theoretical Welfare Economics''.
Family and early life
Graaff was born in Muizenberg on 19 February 1928 into a wealthy Cape Town
Afrikaans
Afrikaans (, ) is a West Germanic language that evolved in the Dutch Cape Colony from the Dutch vernacular of Holland proper (i.e., the Hollandic dialect) used by Dutch, French, and German settlers and their enslaved people. Afrikaans gra ...
family. He was the youngest of
Sir David Graaff, 1st Baronet's three children, his eldest brother was
Sir De Villiers Graaff, 2nd Baronet. At the age of fifteen he matriculated from
Diocesan College
The Diocesan College (commonly known as Bishops) is a private, English medium, boarding and day high school for boys situated in the suburb of Rondebosch in Cape Town in the Western Cape province of South Africa. The school was established on ...
with the second highest marks in South Africa.
In 1951 he married Lillian Clare Thomson, daughter of
Sir George Paget Thomson, and had six children with her.
ThePeerage.com
Quoted from: (S37) Charles Mosley, editor, Burke's Peerage, Baronetage & Knightage, 107th edition, 3 volumes (Wilmington, Delaware, U.S.A.: Burke's Peerage (Genealogical Books) Ltd, 2003), volume 2, p, 1616. Hereinafter cited as Burke's Peerage and Baronetage, 107th edition.
Academia and economics
Graaff graduated from the University of Cape Town
The University of Cape Town (UCT) ( af, Universiteit van Kaapstad, xh, Yunibesithi ya yaseKapa) is a public research university in Cape Town, South Africa. Established in 1829 as the South African College, it was granted full university statu ...
and then went on to complete his PhD in economics at St John's College, Cambridge in 1950, where he lectured economics until 1953. In 1957 he published Theoretical Welfare Economics, a revised version of his PhD thesis that pioneered the concept of welfare economics. The book had six re-prints in its first ten years and was regarded as a highly important work in the field of Welfare Economics.
He left Cambridge due to his dislike of for the politics and infighting of academia and instead bought a farm in the Koue Bokkeveld
The Koue Bokkeveld, meaning "Cold Buck Shrubland" in Afrikaans, is a mountain range in the Western Cape Province, South Africa. Geologically the range is composed of Cedarberg Sandstone of the Cape System.
Location and extent
It is located above ...
region of South Africa. His departure from academia led Paul Samuelson
Paul Anthony Samuelson (May 15, 1915 – December 13, 2009) was an American economist who was the first American to win the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences. When awarding the prize in 1970, the Swedish Royal Academies stated that he " ...
to comment that welfare economics would have been vastly different "if Jannie had not decided to go farming". Although he had ostensibly left academia he remained a visiting lecturer at the University of Cape Town
The University of Cape Town (UCT) ( af, Universiteit van Kaapstad, xh, Yunibesithi ya yaseKapa) is a public research university in Cape Town, South Africa. Established in 1829 as the South African College, it was granted full university statu ...
and Stellenbosch University
Stellenbosch University ( af, Universiteit Stellenbosch) is a public research university situated in Stellenbosch, a town in the Western Cape province of South Africa. Stellenbosch is the oldest university in South Africa and the oldest extant ...
. Graaff was President of the Economic Society of South Africa for the period from 1968 to 1969 and was important in supporting the South African Journal of Economics
''South African Journal of Economics'' is a quarterly peer-reviewed economics journal published by Wiley-Blackwell on behalf of the Economic Society of South Africa (ESSA). The journal was established in 1933. The journal publishes information on ...
.
Graaff made a major contribution to the social welfare function by being the first to derive an equilibrium relationship between equity and national income. Another important contribution made by Graaff was his development of a measure to judge "the well-being of an economy that went beyond the familiar Pareto efficiency
Pareto efficiency or Pareto optimality is a situation where no action or allocation is available that makes one individual better off without making another worse off. The concept is named after Vilfredo Pareto (1848–1923), Italian civil engi ...
criterion: although an economy may be operating efficiently in the sense of utilising all available resources, this may not coincide with the most desired distributional outcome."
Post-academic career
Graaff played a large role in the formation of South Africa's tax code. He was a believer in the "promotion of equity through taxation and in tax as an instrument of redistribution." In the 1970s he sat on John Vorster's economic advisory committee. In the 1980s Graaff was the dominant intellectual figure on the Margo commission which reformed South African tax law. He played a large role in the commission's decision to collect more money from a more efficient, indirect tax thereby leading to the adoption of a value added tax in South Africa. Graaff sat on the Katz commission from 1994 to 1998 which looked at the how the South African tax system could best help the post-Apartheid South African government's social democratic policies thereby leading to the restructuring of the South African Revenue Service
The South African Revenue Service (SARS) is the revenue service of the South African government. It administers the country's tax system and customs service, and enforces compliance with related legislation. It is governed by the SARS Act 34 of ...
as an independent body.
Graaff was also the managing director of the wealth management
Wealth management (WM) or wealth management advisory (WMA) is an investment advisory service that provides financial management and wealth advisory services to a wide array of clients ranging from affluent to high-net-worth (HNW) and ultra-high ...
firm Graaff's Trust and the urban development
Urban means "related to a city". In that sense, the term may refer to:
* Urban area, geographical area distinct from rural areas
* Urban culture, the culture of towns and cities
Urban may also refer to:
General
* Urban (name), a list of peop ...
firm Milnerton Estates, a company that developed a large number of Cape Town's suburbs along the West Coast such as Parklands and Milnerton
Milnerton is a seaside suburb on Table Bay and is located north of central Cape Town in South Africa. It is located 11 kilometres to the north of the city's centre.
Suburbs
Suburbs/ neighbourhoods of the greater Milnerton area include:
* Bot ...
.
Mountaineering
Graaff was one of South Africa's most active and accomplished mountaineers
Mountaineering or alpinism, is a set of outdoor activities that involves ascending tall mountains. Mountaineering-related activities include traditional outdoor climbing, skiing, and traversing via ferratas. Indoor climbing, sport climbin ...
, pioneering mountain climbing routes in East Africa and the Himalayas
The Himalayas, or Himalaya (; ; ), is a mountain range in Asia, separating the plains of the Indian subcontinent from the Tibetan Plateau. The range has some of the planet's highest peaks, including the very highest, Mount Everest. Over 10 ...
. This included being one of the first people to officially summit the Spitzkoppe
The Spitzkoppe (from German for ''"pointed dome"''; also referred to as Spitzkop, Groot Spitzkop, or the "Matterhorn of Namibia") is a group of bald granite peaks or inselbergs located between Usakos and Swakopmund in the Namib desert of Nam ...
n mountain in Namibia. He also wrote a number of articles on mountaineering in the South African Mountaineering Journal.
Death
He died on 6 January 2015, aged 86, in Kenilworth
Kenilworth ( ) is a market town and civil parish in the Warwick District in Warwickshire, England, south-west of Coventry, north of Warwick and north-west of London. It lies on Finham Brook, a tributary of the River Sowe, which joins the ...
, Cape Town after falling and hitting his head on Long Street, Cape Town.
Major works
* ''Fluctuations in Income Concentration'', 1956, South African Journal of Economics
''South African Journal of Economics'' is a quarterly peer-reviewed economics journal published by Wiley-Blackwell on behalf of the Economic Society of South Africa (ESSA). The journal was established in 1933. The journal publishes information on ...
.
* ''Rothbarth's `Virtual Pricing System' and the Slutsky Equation'', 1947, Review of. Economic Studies, 15, 91–95
* ''A Note on the Relative Merit of Taxes and Subsidies'', 1947, South African Journal of Economics
''South African Journal of Economics'' is a quarterly peer-reviewed economics journal published by Wiley-Blackwell on behalf of the Economic Society of South Africa (ESSA). The journal was established in 1933. The journal publishes information on ...
.
* ''Towards an Austerity Theory of Value'', 1948, South African Journal of Economics
''South African Journal of Economics'' is a quarterly peer-reviewed economics journal published by Wiley-Blackwell on behalf of the Economic Society of South Africa (ESSA). The journal was established in 1933. The journal publishes information on ...
.
* ''On Optimum Tariff Structures'', 1949, Review of. Economic Studies.
* ''Theoretical Welfare Economics'', 1957, Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press.
* ''Equity and Efficiency as Components of the General Welfare'', 1977, South African Journal of Economics
''South African Journal of Economics'' is a quarterly peer-reviewed economics journal published by Wiley-Blackwell on behalf of the Economic Society of South Africa (ESSA). The journal was established in 1933. The journal publishes information on ...
.
References
External links
*
The History of Economic Thought – Jan de Van Graaff homepage
Theoretical Welfare Economics: A Comment
M. W. Reder, 5 MAY 2007
{{DEFAULTSORT:Graaff, Jan De Van
Alumni of St John's College, Cambridge
Welfare economists
Development economists
20th-century South African economists
University of Cape Town alumni
People from the Western Cape
Writers from Cape Town
Afrikaner people
1928 births
2015 deaths
Johannes
Johannes is a Medieval Latin form of the personal name that usually appears as "John" in English language contexts. It is a variant of the Greek and Classical Latin variants (Ιωάννης, ''Ioannes''), itself derived from the Hebrew name '' Yeh ...
South African mountain climbers
Younger sons of baronets
People from Cape Town