French economist (1911–2010)
A French economist who formalized how markets self-regulate — work that arrived in the wrong language at the wrong time. By the time the Nobel committee caught up in 1988, English-speaking theorists had already rediscovered what he'd published decades earlier.
Born in Paris in 1911, Allais graduated from the École Polytechnique and initially leaned toward physics, studying pendular oscillations and gravitation. A 1933 trip to Depression-era America turned him toward economics. He spent his career at the École Nationale Supérieure des Mines de Paris, teaching there from 1944 and directing its Economic Analysis Centre from 1946. His refusal to write in English kept his pioneering work on market theory and resource allocation obscure to the dominant academic world; major contributions sat untranslated until others independently arrived at the same conc…
Sourced, dated quotes from Maurice Allais
A theory is only as good as its assumptions. If the premises are false, the theory has no real scientific value.
Too many theorists have a tendency to ignore facts that contradict their convictions.
Any author who uses mathematics should always express in ordinary language the meaning of the assumptions he admits, as well as the significance of the results obtained.
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