Gallery: American Nobel Economists

Awarded for the first time in 1969, the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Science is the Johnny-come-lately Nobel Prize. Since its beginnings, the prize category has been heavily dominated by Americans or by foreign scholars working in the U.S., including, in 1994, John Nash.

Meet the Nobel laureates in economics who call America home. (Complete profiles of all Nobelists appear on the Nobel Foundation's Nobel e-Museum Web site.)

is an international award given yearly since 1901 for achievements in physics, chemistry, medicine, literature and for peace. In 1968, the Bank of Sweden instituted the Prize in Economic Sciences in Memory of Alfred Nobel, founder of the Nobel Prize.

The prizes, which include an amount (SEK 10 million, around euro 1.1 million or US$1.3 million per prize category shared equally among the Laureates), a gold medal and a diploma, are presented on Dec. 10, the anniversary of Nobel's death in 1896.

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A private institution established in 1900 based on the will of Alfred Nobel. The Foundation manages the assets made available through the will for the awarding of the Nobel Prize in Physics, Chemistry, Physiology or Medicine, Literature and Peace. It represents the Nobel institutions externally and administers informational activities and arrangements surrounding the presentation of the Nobel Prize. The Foundation also administers Nobel symposia in the different prize areas.

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People & Events: John Nash and the Nobel Prize

Alfred Nobel, the Swedish industrial giant and inventor, did not include economics when he put together his 1894 will and created prizes in physics, chemistry, medicine, literature, and peace. The economics prize, the one that was so dramatically awarded to John Nash in 1994, was a stepchild created in 1968 not by the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences and the Nobel Foundation, but by the Swedish Central Bank, who funds the prize, making it the "unofficial" Nobel.

Some members of the Swedish Academy, which oversees the selection process, originally dismissed the economics prize as a bad idea that cheapened the original prizes, yet for years grumbling Academy members accepted it as a fait accompli. That assumption would change, however, and the economics prize would be fundamentally altered as a result of the selection of John Nash as the winner of the Nobel Prize in Economics in 1994.

Nobel Foundation choices are often unanimous and in theory, the award-giving process is objective. The truth is not quite as pure. Sweden's most important economist, Assar Lindbeck, had dominated the economics selection since it was first established. In an article Lindbeck wrote on the prize in the mid-1980s, he boasted: "So far the proposals of the prize committee to the Academy have been unanimous. A consensus has in fact developed quite 'automatically' within the committee, as if by some kind of invisible hand, after intensive discussion." Those familiar with the process suggest the controlling hand might have been concealed behind closed doors but was hardly invisible, more like an iron fist wielded by Lindbeck.

The economics committee first encountered John Nash's name in the mid-1980s. At that point game theory, the area where Nash did his Nobel-winning work, was as hot as any in the field of economics. When the committee asked a young researcher, Ariel Rubinstein, to report on the most promising Nobel candidates in game theory, Nash's name topped the list.

In 1987, the committee sought the advice of Jörgen Weibull, an economics professor. He, too, put Nash at the head of the list. In the fall of 1989, Weibull visited the Princeton campus to meet Nash. The meeting was more than friendly. Before Weibull left Sweden, Lindbeck had asked him to check out rumors that Nash's schizophrenia had abated. Weibull remembered first meeting Nash, noting that the mathematician looked extremely nervous and was unable to look his visitor in the eye. Nash's conversation took flight a few times, but overall, Weibull found him no more eccentric or paranoid than many academics he knew.

The moment that turned Weibull from a casual informant to a strong supporter of Nash's candidacy was one shared on their way into the Princeton faculty club. "Can I go in?" asked Nash insecurely. "I'm not faculty." The comment elicited compassion in Weibull, who believed the injustice of Nash's persistent obscurity demanded overturning.

In 1993 the economics committee decided to award a prize in game theory the next year. Lindbeck wanted Nash to win part of the Nobel, but he got stiff opposition from another formidable committee member, Ingemar Stahl, who was afraid that Nash might embarrass or even bring scandal upon the committee, damaging the stature of the prize. Nash was a mathematician, not an economist, Stahl argued, had done his work too long ago, had dropped his research at an early age -- and was mentally ill.

Stahl lost the argument, yet he protested the committee recommendation before the full academy, spurring an unprecedented floor debate. Nash and two other candidates would win the economics prize by only a handful of votes, the first vote ever to come so close to defeat. The behind-closed-doors conflagration would give Academy members an excuse and a momentum to completely overhaul the economics prize the next year, transforming it into a social sciences award that included political science, psychology, and sociology, as well as economics.

Afterwards, Lindbeck admitted that his push for Nash had a strong emotional component. Compared to most other Nobel winners "Nash was different," Lindbeck maintained. "He had gotten no recognition and was living in real misery. We helped lift him into daylight. We resurrected him in a way." The man who told Nash the news of his selection, Carl-Olof Jacobsen, noted aging mathematician's reaction: "He was unusually calm. That was my thought. 'He is taking this very calmly.'"

People & Events

Find out more about the people and events featured in the film.

• John Nash

• Alicia Nash

• John Nash and the Nobel Prize

• Math and Science Achievement in the U.S.

• RAND Corporation

• Cold War Hysteria

• A Definition of Schizophrenia

• Recovery from Schizophrenia• Mental Illness in Film

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People & Events: Alicia Nash (1933-)

The story of John Nash's life -- brilliant mathematician, troubled schizophrenic, and finally winner of the Nobel Prize in Economics -- might have had a far harsher arc if not for his wife, Alicia Larde. Sylvia Nasar, the author of the book A Beautiful Mind, believes that Nash's choice of Larde revealed that his intelligence extended beyond mathematics. "It was Nash's genius," she writes, "to choose a woman who would prove so essential to his survival."

Alicia entered Nash's life as a young M.I.T. student dazzled by a star professor. Alicia remembers the first time she saw Nash. "I walked into the classroom, and I thought he was very nice looking," she said, "he was like the fair-haired boy of the math department." He, while the less eager partner, noticed her as well. "She," John admitted later in life, "was one of the few girls that attracted my attention."

Alicia was strikingly beautiful, well groomed and feminine, wearing full skirts and very high heels. She was intellectually sharp, cosmopolitan, witty, and socially savvy. According to author Sylvia Nash, Joyce Davis, a classmate of Alicia's, described the collegiate Alicia as "an El Salvadoran princess with a sense of noblesse oblige."

Alicia's extended family was an aristocratic clan that hobnobbed with the intelligentsia of El Salvador rather than with the country's landed oligarchy. Alicia's family spoke French and English as well as Spanish, traveled abroad, and lived well in a beautiful villa near the center of San Salvador, El Salvador's capital.

That life vanished when Alicia's father, a doctor, left for the United States in 1944. The family followed, first settling in Biloxi, Mississippi, and then in metropolitan New York City. With a reference written by the El Salvadoran ambassador to the United States, Alicia gained entry to the Marymount School, an exclusive Catholic girls school on the Upper East Side. Alicia's father, excited by his daughter's childhood dream of becoming the next Marie Curie, wrote a letter to the schoolmaster, asking her to help Alicia realize her aspiration to become a nuclear scientist. Alicia did well, becoming one of only 16 women entering the M.I.T. class of 1955.

John and Alicia met in an Advanced Calculus for Engineers class, but became a couple after Nash encountered Alicia at the university's music library, where she worked. Nasar points out that the two shared far more than an attraction: they were both close to their mothers; grew up in houses where intellectual achievement and status were supreme; and were both outsiders. These attractions pulled the two together in marriage in 1957.

After John's sudden onset of schizophrenia, Alicia tried to hide what was going on from friends and faculty. "Alicia wanted to save his career and preserve his intellect," recalled a friend. "It was her interest to keep Nash intact." That was her intention when, pregnant, she had her husband involuntarily committed to McLean Hospital outside Boston, something that Nash bitterly resented.

"I tried to remain positive as much as I could," Alicia remembers. " And I really tried not to feel pity for myself."

After three years of familial turmoil, Alicia filed for divorce, something that the Hollywood version of Nash's life left out. With the help of her mother, Alicia raised their son John on her own. Later he, too, turned out to have schizophrenia. In 1970 a decade after the divorce and with her ex-husband struggling just to survive, Alicia took him into her home not as a husband but as what she called her " boarder."

"They say that a lot of people are left on the back wards of mental institutions," says Alicia, speaking of her decision to take Nash in. "And somehow their few chances to get out go by and they just end up there. So, that was one of the reasons I said, 'Well, I can put you up.' "

"If she hadn' t taken him in, he would have wound up on the streets," believes Nasar. "He had no income. He had no home. I think that Alicia saved his life." In the 1980s, John slowly emerged from schizophrenia and in 1994 he received a Nobel Prize in Economics for the game theory work he completed as a young man. In the spring of 2001, Alicia and John were remarried, 38 years after their divorce.

"We thought it would be a good idea," Alicia stated quite simply. "After all, we've been together most of our lives."

People & Events: Mental Illness in Film

Critics rarely applaud Hollywood for its realistic portrayal of life and its hardships. So it should surprise no one that the myth-making industry gets mental illness, especially schizophrenia, wrong more often than right.

Hollywood's most common sin is its fuzzy-headed habit of confusing schizophrenia with other psychiatric illnesses. "They all get lumped together," says Stella March of the National Alliance for the Mentally Ill (NAMI), a consumer advocacy group for people with severe mental illnesses and their families.

A recent example is Jim Carrey's character in the 2000 comedy, Me, Myself, and Irene. While his silver screen cohorts repeatedly refer to Carrey's character is as a "schizo," Carrey actually portrays a man with a dissociative identity disorder, or multiple personalities. The condition's rarity has not stopped Hollywood from mining the dramatic potential of the so-called "split personality" in many of its classic mental illness movies, from The Three Faces of Eve (1957) to the many more faces exhibited by Sybil (1976).

One of Carrey's sub-personalities is a violent sociopath, another Hollywood stereotype of the person with schizophrenia. In suspense master Alfred Hitchcock's Psycho (1960), Anthony Perkins plays a man who has two personalities: the mild-mannered Norman Bates and his homicidal deceased mother -- not a visitor you'd want in the house while you're showering. Norman's homicidal tendencies seem almost quaint next to later incarnations such as Freddy in Nightmare on Elm Street (1984), one of many movie psychotics who slash and gash their way through silver screen sororities, summer camps, and Saturday nights.

The National Institute of Mental Health in its statement on schizophrenia notes that "most violent crimes are not committed by persons with schizophrenia, and most persons with schizophrenia do not commit violent crimes." Laurie Flynn, former NAMI executive director, might as well have been speaking about any of these movies when she said of Me, Myself and Irene: "This movie reinforces a total misunderstanding of what schizophrenia really is. This character's violent, unpredictable behavior will be unfairly associated with having schizophrenia. It's terribly stigmatizing." NAMI's March makes the point that these demonizing portrayals "cause people to fear and isolate the mentally ill," and can discourage those suffering from psychosis from pursuing treatment, she says.

If the violent maniac is one portrait of mental illness Hollywood puts forward, quaint character is another. These movies paint mental illness with rosy, romantic colors. In the French classic, King of Hearts (1966), patients in the local mental hospital wander into an abandoned town and show themselves as a happy and fun-loving group. The large, furry hallucination that accompanies Jimmy Stewart in Harvey (1950) makes Stewart seem more charming than ill.

A variation on this theme are movies such as One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest (1975), which portrays the institution as far more sickly than those who are kept inside its walls. Another damning portrait of the psychiatric hospital, not altogether inaccurate, is The Snake Pit (1948), which depicts the hellish institution Virginia Cunningham (Olivia de Havilland) must escape before she is cured.

How does Hollywood cure schizophrenia? In The Snake Pit, it's a pipe-tapping psychiatrist who saves the girl. The talking cure, as psychoanalysis is sometimes called, also helps Natalie Wood put her life back together in Elia Kazan's Splendor in the Grass (1961). If talking doesn't help, Hollywood relies on its most favored antidote, true love. In Spellbound (1945), a psychiatrist named Dr. Peterson (Ingrid Bergman) falls in love with an amnesiac patient played by Gregory Peck, a doubly successful antidote that cures Peck's symptoms and solves the murder he is mistakenly accused of.

"Talk therapy is not what people with severe mental illness need," contends March, noting that the conventional wisdom today describes schizophrenia as a genetically-based neurological and biological disease. "Talking does not cure people with serious brain disorders."

Where does A Beautiful Mind (2001) fit in to Hollywood's image of mental illness? Dr. Louis Sass, professor of clinical psychology at Rutgers University and author of Madness and Modernism, likes how the movie portrays John Nash as a little "awkward, weird, cold, and off-putting," not uncommon traits for people who eventually develop schizophrenia. Dr. Sass also says that portraying a person with schizophrenia who wins a Nobel Prize helps make a connection between those inclined toward schizophrenia and a precociousness in fields such as math, physics, and philosophy. "There is often a creative aspect to many people who develop schizophrenia, even though the onset of the disease usually devastates their ability to express this potential," notes Dr. Sass, arguing that the movie helps expand the stereotype of the artistic genius prone to only manic-depression, or a bipolar disorder.

March says that NAMI has been overwhelmed by e-mails from people praising the movie. "A Beautiful Mind was something I was hoping to see for years," she says. "The paranoia, the delusions, the behaviors were all recognizable," she argues. Most of all, she was pleased to see a sympathetic portrayal of someone with the disease that also realistically addresses how it can devastate families.

"People have empathy for people with cancer, or Alzheimer's, or Parkinson's, but they often don't have empathy for people with schizophrenia," she says. "This movie can reach millions of people and begin to change attitudes that are hard to change."

谢谢

强！！！

看看先！

好东西。顶。

实在感谢。

Since 1974, Robert Mundell (born 1932) has been Professor of Economics at Columbia University in New York. After studying at M.I.T. and the London School of Economics, he received his Ph.D. from M.I.T. in 1956, and was the Post-Doctoral Fellow in Political Economy at the University of Chicago in 1956-57. He taught at Stanford University and The Johns Hopkins Bologna Center of Advanced International Studies before joining the staff of the International Monetary Fund in 1961. From 1966 to 1971 he was a Professor of Economics at the University of Chicago and Editor of the journal of Political Economy; and from 1965 to 1975, he was (summer) Professor of International Economics at the Graduate Institute of International Studies in Geneva, Switzerland. For 1997-98 he was the AGIP Professor of Economics at the Johns Hopkins Bologna Center of the Paul H. Nitze School of Advanced International Studies.

Professor Mundell has been an adviser to a number of international agencies and organizations including the United Nations, the IMF, the World Bank, the European Commission, and several governments in Latin America and Europe, the Federal Reserve Board, the US Treasury and the Government of Canada.

In 1970, he was a consultant to the Monetary Committee of the European Economic Commission, and in 1972-73 a member of its Study Group on Economic and Monetary Union in Europe¨. He was a member of the Bellagio-Princeton Study Group on International Monetary Reform from 1964 to 1978, and Chairman of the Santa Colomba Conferences on International Monetary Reform between 1971 and 1987. The author of numerous works and articles on economic theory of international economics, he prepared one of the first plans for a common currency in Europe and is known as the father of the theory of optimum currency areas.

He formulated what became a standard international macroeconomics model, was a pioneer of the theory of the monetary and fiscal policy mix, the theory of inflation and interest, the monetary approach to the balance of payments, and the co-founder of supply-side economics. He has also written extensively on the history of the international monetary system and played a significant role in the founding of the euro. He has also written extensively on the "transition" economies and in 1997 co-founded the Zagreb Journal of Economics.

Mundell's writings include over a hundred articles in the scientific journals and the following books: The International Monetary System: Conflict and Reform, Man and Economics, International Economics, Monetary Theory: Interest, Inflation and Growth in the World Economy, The New International Monetary System (ed. with J. J. Polak) (1977); Monetary Agenda for the World Economy (ed. with Jack Kemp) (1983); and co-edited books Global Disequilibrium (1990); Debts, Deficits and Economic Performance (1991); and Building the New Europe (ed. with M. Baldassarri) (1992); Inflation and Growth in China (ed. with M. Guitian) (1996); and The Euro as a Stabilizer in the International Monetary System (ed. with A. Clesse) (2000). Professor Mundell presented the Frank Graham Memorial Lecture at Princeton University in 1965, the Marshall Lectures at Cambridge University in 1974, and the Ohlin Lectures in 1998. He was the first Rockefeller Research Professor of International Economics at the Brookings Institution in 1964-65, the Ford Foundation Research Professor of Economics at the University of Chicago in 1965-66, the Annenberg Professor of Communications at the University of Southern California in 1980, the Repap Professor of Economics at McGill University in 1989-90, the Richard Fox Professor of Economics at the University of Pennsylvania in 1990-91, and the Agip Professor of Economics at the Bologna Center in 1997-98.

He received a Guggenheim Prize in 1971, the Jacques Rueff Medal and Prize in 1983, the Docteur Honoris Causa from the University of Paris in 1992, an Honorary Professorship at Renmin University in China in 1995, the Distinguished Fellow Award from the American Economic Association in 1997, was made a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in October 1998, and received the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Science in 1999.

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