S. Charles Maurice: in memoriam.
Saving, Thomas R.
S. Charles (Chuck) Maurice, long-time member and former officer of
the Southern Economic Association, died March 4, 1999, in Gainesville,
Florida. He was 67 years old. Maurice is survived by his wife Niccie L.
McKay, an economist in Health Services Administration at the University
of Florida; two sons (S. Charles Maurice Jr. and John Michael Maurice);
a daughter (Ann Maurice Cragin); eight grandchildren; and a sister,
Sandy McKissick.
Chuck Maurice was born June 25, 1931, in Huntington, West Virginia,
but was raised in Pennsylvania. He received his A.B. degree from the
University of Georgia in 1953. He served in the U.S. Army Tank Corps
from 1953 to 1955 and then worked at Sears Roebuck for several years. He
obtained his doctoral degree in 1967 from the University of Georgia.
Maurice joined the faculty of Texas A&M University in 1967 as
Assistant Professor of Economics. He worked his way through the ranks,
being appointed Associate Professor in 1972 and Professor in 1977. He
served as Department Head from 1977 to 1981. Maurice was appointed as
the first Rex B. Grey University Professor from 1981 to 1985. He also
served as Associate Director of the Center for Education and Research in
Free Enterprise at Texas A&M during the period 1981 to 1989. He
retired as Professor of Economics in 1997 and was immediately appointed
Professor Emeritus.
In his early years at Texas A&M, Maurice worked closely with C.
E. Ferguson, with whom he collaborated on a series of professional
articles and on one of the most successful intermediate microeconomics textbooks of its time, Economic Analysis (R. D. Irwin and Company),
which eventually went through six editions. Maurice's research was
firmly rooted in the neoclassical paradigm and dealt mainly with the
theory of production, especially factor demand. It included generalizing
earlier work on the effect of factor price changes on minimum average
cost in competitive industries and investigating factor demand in
consumer-managed and labor-managed firms. His published research
appeared in the Journal of Political Economy, the Western Economic
Journal (now Economic Inquiry), and Economica, among others. But
Maurice's preferred outlet for publication was clearly the Southern
Economic Journal.
Maurice coauthored another successful textbook, Managerial
Economics, now in its sixth edition. Maurice also published scholarly
books, including The Economics of Mineral Resources. Perhaps his most
widely read scholarly book is The Doomsday Myth - 10,000 Years of
Economic Crises, coauthored with Charles Smithson. It was published
during the energy crisis of the 1970s and 1980s and was a challenge to
the then fashionable notion that the world is running out of resources.
That book was a critical success and one of the Hoover
Institution's best-selling works.
Maurice was an outstanding teacher and was deeply involved in the
Texas A&M graduate economics program. For more than 20 years, he
taught production theory in the graduate microeconomics sequence and,
during his career, served as chair or member of nearly 30 Ph.D.
dissertation committees. His former students hold positions in
government, industry, and academia worldwide.
Although Maurice served as president of both the Missouri Valley
Economic Association and the Southwest Economic Association, his heart
remained with the Southern Economic Association (SEA). He was a regular
SEA attendee and presenter throughout his career and regularly hosted
gatherings for friends and former students at the SEA meetings. He
served as a member of the Board of Editors of the Southern Economic
Journal and as a member of the Executive Committee of the Southern
Economic Association from 1984 to 1996.
Thomas R. Saving Texas A&M University
