Nobel Laureate in Economics, 1988

Maurice Allais was born in Paris in 1911. In 1931 he entered the Ecole Polytechnique, where he graduated - first in his class - in 1933. After a year of military service and two years at the Ecole Nationale Supérieure des Mines in Paris, in 1936 he started his career as an engineer in the public mines service. In 1937, he was in charge of the Nantes Mines and Quarries Service, and from 1943 to 1948 was director of the Bureau of Mines Documentation and Statistics in Paris.

From 1941 to 1948 Allais simultaneously performed his administrative duties and published his first works, the most important of which are: A la Recherche d'une Discipline Economique ("In Quest of an Economic Discipline", 1943), and Economie et Intérêt ("Economy and Interest", 1947). From April 1948 on, he was relieved of all administrative duties and was able to devote himself to teaching, research and writing. He was professor of Economic Analysis at the Ecole Nationale Supérieure des Mines from 1944 on and director of a research unit at the CNRS, the French National Council for Scientific Research, from 1946 on. He subsequently held teaching positions at the Institute of Statistics at the University of Paris (1947-1968), the Thomas Jefferson Center of the University of Virginia (as a Distinguished Visiting Scholar, 1958-1959), the Graduate Institute of International Studies in Geneva (1967-l970), and the University of Paris-X (1970-1985). In addition he carried out economic studies for both private and nationalized firms and for the European Economic Community. He retired from the civil service in May 1980 but was able to continue to work thanks to the Ecole Nationale Supérieure des Mines and the CNRS.

In 1988 Allais was awarded the Nobel Prize for Economics "for his pioneering contributions to the theory of markets and efficient utilization of resources". "The foremost contribution of Maurice Allais", says the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences press release, "was made in the 1940s when he continued to develop Walras’ and Pareto’s work by providing increasingly rigorous mathematical formulations of market equilibrium and the efficiency properties of markets". But he also made highly original contributions in other areas of economic research, such as his studies of risk theory and the so-called Allais paradox.

He also devoted himself to two important parallel interests: history and physics. From 1961 to 1968 he wrote the first version of a general text, Essor et déclin des civilisations. Facteurs économiques ("Rise and Fall of Civilizations. Economic Factors"), which he has continued to improve over the past twenty years. Between 1952 and 1960 he also conducted experiments on the anomalies of the Foucault pendulum during a solar eclipse. On 11 August 1999, during the last eclipse of the millennium, NASA set up a test, in cooperation with universities and observatories all over the world, in order to verify his theory.

Allais has received a number of awards. He was the first, and, so far, the only economist to be awarded - in 1978 for his lifetime work - the Gold Medal of the CNRS ("The highest honor for a French scientist"). He has authored several essays: the latest, La mondialisation, la destruction des emplois et de la croissance: l’evidence empirique ("Globalization, the Destruction of Employment and Growth: The Empirical Evidence") was published in November 1999.