Maurice Allais

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 conclusions. He attended the first Mont Pelerin Society meeting but alone refused to sign its statement, breaking with the group over property rights. Samuelson later said that had Allais written in English from the start, "a generation of economic theory would have taken a different course." The Nobel came in 1988, decades after the work. He died in Saint-Cloud in 2010 at ninety-nine.