Nobel Prize

I studied economics and made it my career for two reasons. The subject was and is intellectually fascinating and challenging, particularly to someone with taste and talent for theoretical reasoning and quantitative analysis. At the same time it offered the hope, as it still does, that improved understanding could better the lot of mankind. For…

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Presentation Speech by Professor Herman Wold of the Translation from the Swedish text Your Majesty, Your Royal Highnesses, Ladies and Gentlemen. The great economic depression in the early and mid-1930’s marks the beginning of a new epoch in economic politics and economic science. The scourge of unemployment was severe and lasting, until it was swamped…

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Presentation Speech by Professor Erik Lundberg of the Translation from the Swedish text Your Majesties, Your Royal Highnesses, Ladies and Gentlemen, Economic development research covers a wide sector of economics. What it is concerned with ultimately is why some countries are rich and others poor, why some countries seem to be caught in a vicious…

The adverse economic events following the First World War turned me toward economics. In the Dakotas, where I was born (April 30, 1902), I learned during my youth how hard it was for farm families to stay solvent. Farm product prices fell abruptly by more than half. Banks went bankrupt and many farmers suffered foreclosures.…

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I was born in St. Lucia on January 23, 1915. My parents, who were both school teachers, had immigrated there from Antigua about a dozen years before. The islands were dissimilar in religion and culture, so our family had some slight characteristics of immigrant minorities. My progress through the public schools was accelerated. When I…