It was sometimes said that Gorman published relatively little, and it is true that many of his papers circulated for years in mimeo form, some of them to be rescued by the editors of his Collected Works (see Blackorby and Shorrocks 1995).
However, as the bibliography at the end of this paper shows, even his published output was formidable, and would have satisfied the most demanding research assessment exercise. Gorman's own summary of his principal contributions is worth quoting in full:
James Davidson at Foyle College, Derry, and George Duncan at Trinity College Dublin, taught me to think of mathematics and economics as styles of thought, not collections of theorems, and Birmingham taught me to think of the social sciences as a unity with history as one way of holding them together.
My research has accordingly been devoted to the end of flexible modelling, that is, to allow economists to immerse themselves in their data and in the opinions of other social scientists, and then to choose forms which seem capable of handling this information. This has been even more true of my teaching, largely through workshops for students beginning research (Gorman quoted in Blaug 1986: 328).A reader unfamiliar with Gorman's works might interpret this as the manifesto of a woolly inter-disciplinarian. But the key phrase is ‘flexible modelling'. Gorman was younger than Hicks, who in Value and Capital relegated his mathematics to appendices, and Samuelson, who in his Foundations proselytised about the value of a mathematical approach to economics. To Gorman, technical difficulty was taken for granted, though not an end in itself. Most of his research pursued the goal of using whatever tools were appropriate (and frequently developing new ones) in order to throw light on a central issue in economic theory: the links between individual preferences and market behaviour. Here we comment on some of the main topics which he illuminated.