Nobel Prize

Your majesties, Your Royal Highnesses, Your Excellencies, Laureates, Ladies and Gentlemen. When I was a boy living in Edinburgh in Scotland, especially in December, when the hours of daylight were few, and it was cold, and often wet, I used to dream of escaping to a tropical magic kingdom. I searched the…

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Artist: Hasse Karlsson Calligrapher: Annika Rücker Book binder: Ingemar Dackéus Photo reproduction: Lovisa Engblom

I was born in Cambridge, Massachusetts – not because my family had any connection with higher education, but because my father was a manager at the Metropolitan Life Insurance Company in a nearby town and Cambridge was the nearest hospital – in 1920. In the ensuing years we moved a number of times as a…

My grandparents on both sides immigrated to the United States from Sicily in the early 1900s, so I am a third generation Italian-American. The sec ond generation, my parents and aunts and uncles, were intelligent people, but they reached maturity at the start of the Great Depression, when there were few opportunities, so all worked…

My name sounds very Nordic. Seven of my great-great-grandparents were born in Denmark and two more in Sweden. My first name comes from my Swedish great-great-grandfather, Lars Toolson, whose son also had the first name Lars. My middle name is from my great-grandfather Peter Hansen, who was born in Denmark. Fifteen of my sixteen great-great-grandparents,…

In reflecting on my own life history on the occasion of the Nobel Prize, I find myself wondering about some traits of my research, about the kind of colleagues I have chosen to associate with in research, and why I even went into economics. I have used this occasion to think about the true origins…