Maurice Allais facts for kids
Quick facts for kids
Maurice Allais
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Maurice Allais
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| Born | 31 May 1911 Paris, France
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| Died | 9 October 2010 (aged 99) Saint-Cloud, near Paris, France
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| Nationality | French |
| Field | Macroeconomics Behavioral economics |
| School or tradition |
Walrasian economics |
| Alma mater | École Polytechnique École Nationale Supérieure des Mines de Paris University of Paris |
| Influences | Léon Walras Irving Fisher Vilfredo Pareto |
| Contributions | Overlapping generations model golden rule of optimal growth Transaction demand for money rule Allais paradox |
| Awards | Nobel Prize in Economics (1988) |
| Information at IDEAS / RePEc | |
Maurice Félix Charles Allais (born May 31, 1911 – died October 9, 2010) was a French scientist. He was both a physicist and an economist. In 1988, he won the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences.
He received this award for his important ideas about how markets work. He also studied how to use resources in the best way. Allais was born in Paris, France. He lived to be 99 years old.
Allais went to famous schools in Paris, like the École Polytechnique. After a trip to the United States in 1933, during a time called the Great Depression, he decided to study economics. He had a long career teaching economics at the École Nationale Supérieure des Mines de Paris.
He was influenced by other great economists like Léon Walras and Irving Fisher. Many of his ideas were ahead of their time. Some of his work became known later when other economists rediscovered similar concepts.
Paul Samuelson, another Nobel Prize winner, once said that if Allais's early writings had been in English, economic theory might have developed differently.
Contents
Understanding Allais's Economic Ideas
Maurice Allais wrote many important studies in economics. He focused on using mathematics to understand how economies work. His work covered topics like how markets reach balance, how capital (money and assets) grows, and how people make choices. He also studied how central banks manage money.
Early Ideas and Market Balance
Allais's first major book, Traité d'économie pure, was written between 1941 and 1943. In this book, he explored how individual parts of the economy work together. He showed that a market economy naturally moves towards a state of maximum efficiency. This means resources are used in the best possible way.
He proved that if a market is in balance, it is also very efficient. And if an economy is very efficient, it can also be in market balance. This idea was later also found by other famous economists like Kenneth Arrow.
Time, Money, and Growth
In 1947, Allais wrote another important work called Économie et Intérêt. Here, he added the ideas of time and money to his studies. He looked at how capitalist economies grow and change over time.
He introduced the first overlapping generations model. This model helps explain how different generations (like your parents and you) interact in an economy. He also described the "golden rule of optimal growth." This rule shows how much a country should save to have the highest possible consumption over time.
Understanding Choices and Risk
Allais was also a pioneer in a field called Behavioral economics. This area studies how people actually make decisions, which can sometimes be different from what traditional economic models predict.
In the 1940s, he studied how people make choices when they are uncertain about the future. He developed a theory about how people value different outcomes. In 1953, he came up with the Allais paradox. This paradox showed that people don't always choose what gives them the highest expected gain. Instead, they often prefer certainty, even if it means a smaller potential reward.
Views on Society and Economy
Allais believed that there were similarities between liberalism and socialism. He thought that it didn't matter if businesses were owned by private people or by the government. What mattered most was that the economy worked well and was fair for everyone.
He even suggested a "competitive planning" idea. This was his way of combining the best parts of both liberalism and socialism. He wanted a society that went beyond simple "laissez-faire" (meaning no government involvement) but also wasn't fully socialist.
Challenging Economic Theories
Later in his career, Allais became critical of some economic theories. He felt that some economists focused too much on complex math. He thought they should pay more attention to how real markets actually work.
He believed that economic systems are always changing and looking for new ways to create value. He said that a market is in balance when there are no more new ways to create value.
His ideas about how people form expectations were also very original. He thought that people's expectations about the future were influenced by both their past experiences and current events.
Thoughts on Globalization
Maurice Allais was very concerned about Globalization. In his 1990 book, La mondialisation: destruction des emplois et de la croissance (Globalization: destruction of jobs and growth), he wrote about his worries.
He believed that too much free trade could lead to instability, job losses, and unfairness around the world. He argued that the idea of free trade only works when countries are very similar. When countries have very different wage levels, he thought free trade could harm industries in higher-income countries.
Allais linked economic crises to globalization. He said that the financial crisis was a sign of a deeper problem: too much competition in the global job market. He believed that unemployment was caused by companies moving jobs to other countries. He felt that some protection for local industries was necessary.
He also had concerns about the Treaty of Maastricht, which created the single European currency. He thought it focused too much on free trade.
Allais's Work in Physics
Besides economics, Maurice Allais also conducted experiments in gravitation, special relativity, and electromagnetism between 1952 and 1960. He wanted to see if these different areas of physics were connected.
He reported three interesting effects:
- He noticed an unusual change in the swing of a special pendulum during solar eclipses in 1954 and 1959. This is now known as the Allais effect.
- He also found strange patterns in the pendulum's swing that seemed to follow the Earth's rotation and the tides.
- He observed unusual changes in optical measurements that also followed patterns related to the sun and moon.
Scientists around the world have tried to repeat his pendulum experiments. However, the results have been mixed, with some experiments supporting his findings and others not.
See also
- In Spanish: Maurice Allais para niños
