Robert Giffen

History of Financial Advice Collection. Along with Arthur Crump and Robert Lucas Nash, Robert Giffen was one of a new generation of journalists writing in the 1870s who reached beyond their daily or weekly columns in order to provide the public with financial education. Giffen, who had been Walter Bagehot’s assistant editor at The Economist between 1868 and 1876, explained that he wrote his book in an attempt to systematize all the opinion on the reasons for changes in the price of securities he had encountered during his time at the paper. While he acknowledged that some might criticise his book for containing little more than common sense, he argued that such basic guides were essential due to “how utterly devoid of common sense the average investor is” when it came to their investments. The book, which one reviewer urged “every provident man in the three kingdoms” to study, was reprinted in 1879. Giffen spent the rest of his career combining journalism with government work, heading up the statistical department at the Board of Trade from 1876, and co-founding the influential financial paper The Statist in 1878. He was knighted in 1895.… (més)