17 Facts About Maurice Allais

Maurice Felix Charles Allais was a French physicist and economist, the 1988 winner of the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences "for his pioneering contributions to the theory of markets and efficient utilization of resources", along with John Hicks and Paul Samuelson, to neoclassical synthesis.

Maurice Allais died at his home in Saint-Cloud, near Paris, at the age of 99.

Maurice Allais considered Leon Walras, Wilfredo Pareto, and Irving Fisher to be his primary influences.

Maurice Allais was reluctant to write in or translate his work into English, and many of his major contributions became known to the dominant community only when they were independently rediscovered or popularized by English-speaking economists.

Maurice Allais attended the inaugural meeting of the Mont Pelerin Society, but he was alone among the attendees to refuse to sign the statement of aims because of a disagreement over the extent of property rights.

Maurice Allais exerted an important influence, at the end of the war, on French economists such as Gerard Debreu, Jacques Lesourne, Edmond Malinvaud and Marcel Boiteux.

Maurice Allais anticipates several of the propositions and theorems put forward by Hicks, Samuelson and others, sometimes giving them a more general and rigorous formulation.

In 1947, in the second part of his work Economie et Interet, Maurice Allais introduced time and currency and thus tackled the dynamics and growth of capitalist economies.

Maurice Allais introduced the first overlapping generations model, introduced the golden rule of optimal growth before Trevor Swan and Edmund Phelps, show that an interest rate equal to the growth rate maximizes consumption.

Maurice Allais described the transaction demand for money rule before William Baumol and James Tobin.

Maurice Allais was responsible for early work in Behavioral economics, which in the US is generally attributed to Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky.

Maurice Allais formulated the Allais paradox in 1953, which questions the traditional model of rationality of choices and contradicts the expected utility hypothesis.

Maurice Allais's Hereditary, Relativist and Logistic theory of monetary dynamics contains an original theory of expectations formation that is a genuine alternative to both adaptive and rational expectations.

Maurice Allais's contribution has nevertheless been "lost": it has been absent from the debate about expectations.

Maurice Allais believes that Ricardo's theory is valid only in a steady state, but disappears when the specializations evolve and when the capital is mobile.

Maurice Allais considers that "unemployment arise from the offshoring, themselves due to the excessive differences in wages"; "reasoned protectionism between countries with very different incomes, is not only justified but absolutely necessary"; and the absence of protection will destroy all industries of each country with higher incomes.

In 1992, Maurice Allais criticised the Maastricht Treaty for its excessive emphasis on free trade.