topics: |  economics | biography |

autobiographical accounts of the careers of twenty-three leading economists.

Excerpts

Milton Friedman: What does an economist have to do to get a Nobel Prize

As most of you may know, the economics award is relatively recent. It was established by the Central Bank of Sweden in 1968 to commemorate its three-hundredth anniversary. So far, twenty-two people have received the Nobel award in economics. Not one of them has been female—so, to judge only from the past, the most important thing to do if you want to be a Nobel laureate is to be male.

I hasten to add that the absence of females is not, I believe, attributable to male chauvinist bias on the part of the Swedish Nobel Committee. I believe that the economics profession as a whole would have been nearly unanimous that, during the period in question, only one female candidate met the relevant standards— the English economist Joan Robinson, who has since died. The failure of the Nobel Committee to award her a prize may well have reflected bias but not sex bias. The economists here will understand what I am talking about.

A second requirement is to be a U.S. citizen. Twelve of the twenty-two recipients of the Nobel Prize were from the United States, four from the United Kingdom, two from Sweden, and one each from four other countries. This generalization is less clear-cut than the first because the population of the United States is more than three times as large as Britain, but the number of Nobel recipients only three times as large. So on a percapita basis, Britain has a better record than we have.

A third generalization is, at least to me, the most interesting statistical result. Of the twelve Americans who have won the Nobel Prize in economics, nine either studied or taught at the University of Chicago. So the next lesson is to go to the University of Chicago. And I may say, in addition to those nine, one other, Friedrich Hayek, also taught at the University of Chicago for ten years. However, I have classified him as an Austrian rather than an American in my compilation. Beyond that, the statistics won’t go, and that’s all the advice I can give to potential Nobel laureates.

The accidental road to a career in economics

W. Arthur Lewis: I had never meant to be an economist.  My father had
	wanted me to be a lawyer...

Lawrence R. Klein: 
	I entered economics because, as a youth of the depression, I wanted
	intensely to have some understanding of what was going on around
	me. It was psychologically difficult to grow up during the
	depression. It was easy to become discouraged about economic life and
	did not give one, at eighteen or twenty years, the feeling that there
	were boundless opportunities just waiting for exploitation.

Kenneth J. Arrow: 
	One might suppose, for example, that the personal histories and class
	backgrounds of economists would be important factors. Yet that does
	not seem to be the case. Among the great economists of the nineteenth
	century, David Ricardo was a highly successful businessman, a
	stock-exchange speculator to be exact, while John Stuart Mill was
	brought up to be an intellectual by an exacting father. Yet their
	economic theories were very similar indeed.

	When it came to college, my family’s poverty constrained me to attend
	the City College, which was then a completely free college
	opportunity that New York City had offered since 1847.

	When I took Harold Hotelling's course in mathematical economics, I
	realized I had found my niche.

Paul A. Samuelson: 

	A bright youngster, favored by admiring parents, [Paul] shone at
	school until the high-school years when he became an underachiever.

	The calendar lies in naming May 15, 1915, as his time of birth.
	Truly he was born on the morning of January 2, 1932, at the
	University of Chicago.  

	He was made for academic life. An A student at Chicago and an A+ one
	at Harvard, PAS wandered by chance into economics. Economics turned
	out to be made for him as the Darwinian genes from generations of
	commercial ancestors encountered their teleological destiny.

Milton Friedman: How chance rules our life history

I have been enormously impressed by the role that pure chance plays in
determining our life history.

As I recalled my own experience and development, I was impressed by the
series of lucky accidents that determined the road I traveled. The first, and
surely the most important, was the lucky accident that I was born in the
United States. Both my parents were born in Carpatho-Ruthenia, which when
they emigrated to the United States was part of Austro-Hungary, later, part
of Czechoslovakia, currently, part of the Soviet Union.

The second major lucky accident was a high-school teacher I had as a
sophomore. His field was political science—or civics, as it was called
then—but he had a great love for geometry. The course I took from him in
Euclidean geometry instilled in me a love and respect for and interest in
mathematics that has remained with me ever since. 

Because of my interest in math, I planned to major in mathematics. I
was very innocent and the only occupation I knew of that used mathematics
was being an insurance actuary, so that was my intended career.

By accident, I also took some courses in economics, and that is where the
Goddess of Chance entered the picture, because the Rutgers economics faculty
included two extraordinary teachers who had a major impact on my life. One
was Arthur F. Burns, who many years later became chairman of the Federal
Reserve System and is currently our ambassador to West Germany. When I first
studied under him, more than fifty years ago, Arthur was in the process of
writing his doctoral dissertation. Then, and in my later contacts with him,
he instilled a passion for scientific integrity and for accuracy and care
that has had a major effect on my scientific work.

I was lucky enough to receive two offers of tuition scholarships, one in
applied mathematics from Brown University and one in economics from the
University of Chicago.  

It was close to a toss of a coin that determined which offer I accepted.  If
I had gone to Brown, I would have become an applied mathematician. 69

Robert M. Solow

I arrived at Harvard College in September 1940. Economics A was one
of my four freshman courses. I had no idea then of becoming an economist;
I probably didn’t know there was such a thing as a professional
economist, or what one did. My recollection is that I had some notion
of studying biology.  

Three years later I came back and, almost without thinking about it,
signed up to finish my undergraduate degree as an economics major. 156