The book had six re-prints in its first ten years and was regarded as a highly important work in the field of Welfare Economics.

[6] He left Cambridge due to his dislike of for the politics and infighting of academia and instead bought a farm in the Koue Bokkeveld region of South Africa.

His departure from academia led Paul Samuelson to comment that welfare economics would have been vastly different "if Jannie had not decided to go farming".

[5] Graaff made a major contribution to the social welfare function by being the first to derive an equilibrium relationship between equity and national income.

In the 1980s Graaff was the dominant intellectual figure on the Margo commission which reformed South African tax law.