Macroeconomics

Nobel Macroeconomists

ing an infinite discounted sum of one-period util-

ities, but you couldn’t prove it by me. To me it

felt as if I were saying to myself: ‘What the hell.’”

Robert Lucas (Nobel 1995): “In public school sci-

ence was an unending and not very well organized

list of things other people had discovered long ago.

In college, I learned something about the process

of scientific discovery, but what I learned did not

attract me as a career possibility. . . . What I liked

thinking about were politics and social issues.”

George Akerlof (Nobel 2001): “When I went to

Yale, I was convinced that I wanted to be either an

economist or an historian. Really, for me it was a

distinction without a difference. If I was going to

be an historian, then I would be an economic his-

torian. And if I was to be an economist I would

consider history as the basis for my economics.”

Edward Prescott (Nobel 2004): “Through discus-

sion with [my father], I learned a lot about the way

businesses operated. This was one reason why I

liked my microeconomics course so much in my

first year at Swarthmore College. The price theory

that I learned in that course rationalized what I

had learned from him about the way businesses

operate. The other reason was the textbook used

in that course, Paul A. Samuelson’s Principles of Eco-

nomics. I loved the way Samuelson laid out the the-

ory in his textbook, so simply and clearly.”

Edmund Phelps (Nobel 2006): “Like most Ameri-

cans entering college, I started at Amherst College

without a predetermined course of study or without

even a career goal. My tacit assumption was that I

would drift into the world of business—of money,

doing something terribly smart. In the first year,

though, I was awestruck by Plato, Hume and James.

I would probably have gone into philosophy were it

not that my father cajoled and pleaded with me to

try a course in economics, which I did the second

year. . . . I was hugely impressed to see that it was

possible to subject the events in those newspapers I

had read about to a formal sort of analysis.”

If you want to learn more about the Nobel

Prize and its winners, go to www.nobelprize.org.

1

1

The first five quotations are from William Breit and Barry T. Hirsch, eds., Lives of the Laureates,

4th ed. (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2004). The next two are from the Nobel Web site. The last

one is from Arnold Heertje, ed., The Makers of Modern Economics, Vol. II (Aldershot, U.K.: Edward

Elgar Publishing, 1995).

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