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Leonid Hurwicz: Clever Designer is a really pleasurable biography of one of many winners of the economics Nobel for his work on mechanism design (together with Eric Maskin and Roger Myerson). It’s written by his son Michael Hurwicz, and is subsequently a real labour of affection. It’s clear quite a lot of work has gone into assembling and recounting this story of a rare life, from his delivery to Polish Jewish refugee mother and father in revolutionary Russia in 1917, by way of a childhood in Warsaw after the primary World Battle, by way of being a near-penniless refugee away from his household throughout the second World Battle, to his educational profession within the US, principally on the College of Minnesota. His mother and father and brother survived the warfare (albeit his father ending up in a Soviet gulag for a while) and in addition moved to the US.
The ebook has little or no of the economics, and is attention-grabbing as biographies usually are for tracing the mental historical past of their topic. Hurwicz’s household put a lot emphasis on their sons’ schooling – because the writer writes, “Over the centuries, schooling had functioned as a uniquely moveable type of wealth,” for folks whose ancestors had usually been pressured to maneuver. Hurwicz had been taught by or labored for folks starting from Hayek to Samuelson, Oskar Lange to (on the Cowles Fee) Jacob Marschak. He additionally sounds a pleasant individual. Certainly one of his traits – a love of studying many languages – jogged my memory of my beloved late tutor Peter Sinclair.
I learn the ebook in two sittings. One reflection it prompted was on the unanticipated penalties of complete warfare: their shaping of the character and concepts of a technology of nice postwar economists – because the ebook’s second subtitle places it, “How Battle and the Nice Despair Impressed a Nobel Economist”; and on the large inventory of human knowledge the US gained by opening its borders, albeit with reluctance, to European refugees.
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