Maurice Allais

Maurice Allais was a French economist and physicist born in Paris in 1911 and died in Saint-Cloud in 2010 at the age of ninety-nine. He grew up in modest circumstances after his father's death in a German prisoner-of-war camp during the First World War, and he won admission to the École Polytechnique, graduating first in his class in 1933, before training as a mining engineer at the École des Mines.

Allais worked as an engineer in the French mining administration in the 1930s and turned to economics during the Great Depression, largely teaching himself the discipline. His 1943 treatise À la recherche d'une discipline économique and the 1947 follow-up Économie et intérêt laid out a rigorous mathematical theory of general equilibrium, capital, and intertemporal choice years before similar work appeared in the English-speaking world.

In 1953 he devised what is now called the Allais paradox, a thought experiment in which most people's choices between gambles violate the expected-utility axioms then taken as gospel by economists. The paradox helped open the door to behavioral economics and decision theory under uncertainty. He also worked on monetary policy, public-utility pricing, and the dynamics of capital, often in tension with Anglo-American orthodoxy.

The Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences awarded Allais the 1988 Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences for his contributions to the theory of markets and the efficient utilization of resources, making him the first French economist to receive the honor. He continued to publish on monetary reform, European integration, and the physics of pendulums into his nineties.

The name Maurice comes from the Late Latin Mauritius, derived from Maurus, meaning a Moor or dark-skinned person. The third-century Saint Maurice, leader of the Theban Legion, carried the name into medieval Europe, where it became common in France. He bore it as the surname of an unflinching independent thinker.