Robert Lucas, who won a Nobel Prize for his path-breaking work on rational expectations that questioned the efficacy of government intervention in the economy, has died. He was 85.
(Bloomberg) — Robert Lucas, who won a Nobel Prize for his path-breaking work on rational expectations that questioned the efficacy of government intervention in the economy, has died. He was 85.
His death was confirmed on Monday by the University of Chicago, where he had been a professor since 1975.
Lucas won the Nobel Prize in 1995 for research on how expectations affect economic decisions by consumers and businesses. In what became known as the Lucas critique, introduced in a 1976 study, he argued that policy makers can’t presume that their actions will yield the intended results; instead, they need to take account of how those actions will affect people’s expectations.
Lucas’s work suggested that policies to push unemployment ever lower could backfire by stoking inflation expectations.
His research in the 1970s was seen as a frontal assault on Keynesian economics and its belief in government intervention to affect the ups and downs of the economy.
Lucas “leaves behind a legacy of revolutionary research, teaching and leadership that transformed the field of economics,” Robert Shimer, chair of the Kenneth C. Griffin Department of Economics at the University of Chicago, said in a statement published on the school’s website.
Robert Emerson Lucas Jr. was born in 1937 in Yakima, Washington, the first of four children of Robert Emerson Lucas and the former Jane Templeton. His parents had moved from Seattle to Yakima to open an ice cream restaurant, which failed during an economic downturn in 1937-1938, Lucas wrote in a Nobel autobiography.
Later, back in Seattle, his father worked as a shipyard steamfitter and his mother resumed an earlier career as a fashion artist. His father eventually joined a commercial refrigeration company as a welder and worked his way up to president.
Lucas was educated in the Seattle public schools. He received a bachelor’s degree in history and Ph.D. in economics from the University of Chicago. After a stint teaching at Carnegie-Mellon University from 1963 to 1974, he returned to Chicago, where he eventually became professor emeritus.
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