William D. Grampp (August 22, 1914 – August 30, 2019) was an American economist.
Academic career
In 1944 he was awarded his PhD in economics from the University of Chicago. His dissertation was titled “Mercantilism and Laissez Faire in American Political Discussion”. He worked as a journalist before joining the University of Illinois, where he taught from 1947 to 1980. In 1980 he became professor emeritus and also a visiting professor of social science at the University of Chicago. In 1994 he was appointed lecturer at the University of Chicago Law School.
He analysed economic liberalism in a two-volume work published in 1965. He argued that economic liberalism was not synonymous with laissez-faire; in British classical liberal thought the "government may do whatever it can do that the people will have it do", whereas the utilitarian liberal believed that the "government may do whatever it can do that people have it do or can be made to believe it should do". Grampp also asserted that the impact of utilitarianism transformed classical liberalism into modern liberalism, such as that seen in 1960s America.
In his 1989 work, Pricing the Priceless: Art, Artists and Economics, Grampp adhered to the rational choice theory to explain behavior.
Works
Books
The Manchester School of Economics (Stanford University Press, 1960). Economic Liberalism, Volume I: The Beginnings (New York: Random House, 1965). Economic Liberalism, Volume II: The Classical View (New York: Random House, 1965). Pricing the Priceless: Art, Artists and Economists (New York: Basic Books, 1989).