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From http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Knut_Wicksell
Wicksell was born in Stockholm, Sweden on December 20, 1851. His father was a relatively successful businessman and real estate broker. He lost both his parents at a relatively young age – his mother died when he was only six years old, and his father died when he was fifteen. His father's considerable estate allowed the now fatherless child to enroll at the University of Uppsala in 1869 to study mathematics and physics. He received his first degree in two years, but continued in graduate studies until 1885 when he received his doctorate in mathematics. In 1887, Wicksell received a scholarship to study on the continent where he heard lectures by the economist Carl Menger in Vienna. In the following years, his interests began to shift toward the social sciences, and in particular, economics.
As a lecturer at Uppsala, Wicksell had attracted attention for his opinions about labor. At one lecture, he condemned drunkenness and prostitution as alienating, degrading, and impoverishing. Although he was sometimes identified as a socialist, his solution to the above problem was decidedly Malthusian in advocating birth control – a theory he would defend to the end of his life. Although he had attracted some attention for his fiery ideas, his first work in economics, Value, Capital and Rent, published in 1892, was largely unnoticed. In 1896, he published Studies in the theory of Public Finance, applying the ideas of marginalism to progressive taxation, public goods, and other aspects of public policy, attracting considerably more interest.
Wicksell married Anna Bugge in 1887, although he found it difficult to support his family on his irregular positions and publications. Economics in Sweden at the time was taught as part of the law school and Wicksell was unable to gain a chair as a professor until he was awarded a law degree. He returned to the University of Uppsala where he completed a four-year law degree in two years, and subsequently became an associate professor at that university in 1899. The next year, he became a full professor at Lund University, where he would undertake his most influential work.
After giving a lecture in 1908 satirizing the Immaculate Conception, Wicksell was deemed guilty of blasphemy and imprisoned for two months.[1] Eight years later, in 1916, Wicksell retired from his post at Lund and took a position at Stockholm advising the government on financial and banking issues. In Stockholm, Wicksell associated himself with other future great economists of the so-called "Stockholm School," such as Bertil Ohlin, Gunnar Myrdal and Erik Lindahl. He also taught a young Dag Hammarskjöld, the future Secretary-General of the United Nations.
Wicksell died in 1926 while writing a final work on the theory of interest. Elements of his public policy were taken strongly to heart by the Swedish government, including his price-level targeting rule during the 1930s (Jonung 1979), and also his vision of a welfare state. Wicksell's contributions to economics have been described by some economists, including historian-of-economics Mark Blaug, as fundamental to modern macroeconomics. Michael Woodford has especially praised Wicksell's advocacy of using the interest rate to maintain price stability, noting that this was a remarkable insight at a time when most monetary policy was based on the gold standard (Woodford, 2003, p. 32). Woodford calls his own framework 'neo-Wicksellian', and he titled his textbook on monetary policy in homage to Wicksell's work.