Word: haavelmo
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...When the telephone range at Trygve Haavelmo's house in Oslo yesterday morning, there was none of the usual surprised-by-joy reaction of a fellow learning he has been awarded the $455,000 Nobel Economics Prize," Warsh writes. "Instead, Hsavelmo was vexed about being called at home. He told the Reuter reporter: I Don't like the ideas of such prizes. I'm not going to talk about this on the phone, and I haven't thought it through. Don't write anything." The 78-year-old theorist then went out and was not heard from for the rest...
Most winners of the Nobel Prize respond with joy and gratitude to the singular, once-in-a-lifetime honor. But Norway's Trygve Haavelmo bluntly criticized the award last week after he was named the 1989 laureate in economics. Haavelmo, 77, a modest and shy University of Oslo professor emeritus, told a reporter, "I don't like the idea of such prizes...
...pathbreaking work in the early 1940s that laid the foundation for econometrics, which uses mathematical models to study the behavior of an economy. "Every time you open a newspaper and see an analysis of economic trends," said Assar Lindbeck, chairman of the economics- prize committee, "it is based on Haavelmo's econometric theories." Haavelmo's key contribution was to show that the relationship between such factors as income and spending was far more complex than had been thought, since those factors affect one another and the rest of the economy. For example, he demonstrated that an economist could not gauge...
...While Haavelmo has lived for years in contented obscurity, many prominent economists welcomed his selection. Said Lawrence Klein of the University of Pennsylvania, who won the 1980 economics award for his work in econometrics: "Haavelmo had a tremendous influence on me and on many other young econometricians in the 1940s." Concurred Robert Solow of the Massachusetts $ Institute of Technology, the 1987 laureate: "It's like giving the Nobel Prize for Physics to Thomas Edison. You slap your forehead and wonder why they didn't do it sooner...
...fact, Haavelmo's prize reflected a situation that is unique to the award for economics. The Nobel Prizes were first given in 1901, but the economics citation was not added until 1969, when it was established by Sweden's central bank. That late start has prompted the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences to choose many older economists whose work could not be recognized when it was first published. "They're clearing up the backlog," says Harvard economist Zvi Griliches, who hailed this year's choice. "They haven't got to the point of recognizing something interesting that happened...
| 1 |