Nobel Prize

I was born in Helsinki in 1949. My sister Marianne was born in 1946. Our parents were married when the war against the Soviet Union ended in 1944. My father had spent five years on the front like so many young Finnish men. The post-war years were challenging socially and economically. The government had to…

Interview, December 2017 https://youtu.be/Zjbw69TBvps Interview with Richard H. Thaler, Laureate in Economic Sciences 2017, on 6 December 2017 during the Nobel Week in Stockholm, Sweden. Richard H. Thaler answers the following questions (the links below lead to clip on YouTube): – Did you ever think you would get the call from Stockholm? – What does…

I was born in London in 1948. My parents were both doctors. My mother was a gynecologist at a time when women doctors in the U.K. were relatively uncommon; she was a German-born Jew, who had left Germany in 1933 just after Hitler came to power. My father was an epidemiologist of some distinction whose…

Your Majesties, Your Royal Highnesses, Ladies and Gentlemen: Robert Kennedy once said, “Some men see things as they are and ask why. I dream of things that never were and ask why not.” Those words reveal a deep truth about Kennedy: he was an economist at heart – startling though that may…

In the mid 20th century, economists found themselves in need of a new theoretical framework with which to tackle the comparison of fundamentally different types of economic organization, such as capitalist and socialist institutions. Discussions between the likes of Oskar Lange and led to the development of the idea that economic institutions could be viewed…

In a remarkably succinct, ten-page article published in 1979, Paul Krugman proposed a new trade model that changed the way economists view the international exchange of goods. At the heart of the model lay two concepts that reflected the general twentieth century trend towards having more: the increased production of goods, leading to economies of…

The 2009 Sveriges Riksbank Prize for Economic Sciences is concerned with the basic question of where best to conduct transactions; in the open market, within firms, or among self-regulating groups of individuals. Elinor Ostrom has made extensive studies of the management of common property by groups of common owners, contrasting that with management by state…

If you have ever tried to find a job, or to buy or rent a house, you will know that such undertakings are not without their ‘inefficiencies’, or, as economists like to term them, their frictions. The same goes for those trying to fill jobs, or sell homes: although the perfect employee or buyer might…

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