I was born in Cambridge, Massachusetts – not because my family had any connection with higher education, but because my father was a manager at the Metropolitan Life Insurance Company in a nearby town and Cambridge was the nearest hospital – in 1920. In the ensuing years we moved a number of times as a…

My grandparents on both sides immigrated to the United States from Sicily in the early 1900s, so I am a third generation Italian-American. The sec ond generation, my parents and aunts and uncles, were intelligent people, but they reached maturity at the start of the Great Depression, when there were few opportunities, so all worked…

My name sounds very Nordic. Seven of my great-great-grandparents were born in Denmark and two more in Sweden. My first name comes from my Swedish great-great-grandfather, Lars Toolson, whose son also had the first name Lars. My middle name is from my great-grandfather Peter Hansen, who was born in Denmark. Fifteen of my sixteen great-great-grandparents,…

In reflecting on my own life history on the occasion of the Nobel Prize, I find myself wondering about some traits of my research, about the kind of colleagues I have chosen to associate with in research, and why I even went into economics. I have used this occasion to think about the true origins…

Kailash Satyarthi (born on January 11, 1954) is a human rights activist from India who has been at the forefront of the global movement to end child slavery and exploitation since 1980, when he gave up a lucrative career as an electrical engineer to initiate a crusade against child servitude. As a grass-roots activist, Kailash…

The first sixty-nine years of my life are summed up here, as far as I can remember them. I was born on 30 July 1945 in France, at 11 allée Marguerite, Boulogne-Billancourt, close to Paris. My brother Rudy was born on 5 October 1947. Until the age of four I was brought up by my…

Alice Munro by Robert Thacker Alice Laidlaw Munro was born in Wingham, Ontario, Canada on July 10, 1931, the eldest child of Robert Eric Laidlaw (1901–76), a fox farmer, and Anne Clarke Chamney Laidlaw (1898–1959), a former schoolteacher. Members of her father’s family, having emigrated to Upper Canada from the Ettrick Valley on the Scottish…

I was born and raised in Fosnavåg, a small town on an island on the west coast of Norway, in one of the most beautiful parts of the country (Fig. 1). My parents owned a small farm, although my father worked as a carpenter. My mother took most of the responsibility for the farm and…

I was born in 1962 on the west coast of Norway, about 200 kilometres north of Bergen. I spent the first 9 months of my life on Haramsøy (Fig. 1), an island with fewer than 500 inhabitants and, at that time, only a single daily ferry connection to the mainland. In 1963 my parents and…

William Faulkner (1897-1962), who came from an old southern family, grew up in Oxford, Mississippi. He joined the Canadian, and later the British, Royal Air Force during the First World War, studied for a while at the University of Mississippi, and temporarily worked for a New York bookstore and a New Orleans newspaper. Except for…