My grandparents immigrated to the U.S. around the turn of the last century. My mother’s parents and six older siblings came from Poland. My father’s parents met in New York, she having come from Russia and he from Romania. My parents, both born in 1908, grew up in New York and never lived outside the…

I was born in Los Angeles, California, on August 7, 1933, and grew up during the Great Depression. Fortunately, our house had a large backyard that we filled with a vegetable garden and fruit trees. I learned how to grow vegetables and how to can apricots and peaches during the heat of summer. During World…

Paul Krugman’s is a lone voice, telling things as they are and debunking Washington policies that are neither compassionate nor conservative.”– Paul Samuelson Paul Krugman has at least three jobs: he is professor of economics and international affairs at Princeton University, Centenary Professor at the London School of Economics, and perhaps his best-known job an…

A scholar’s greatest asset is his or her intuition about what questions to study and with what methodology. A scientific autobiography should shed some light on how this intuition grew and developed over time. The interests that shape one’s adult life generally have deep roots in childhood. I grew up in a comfortable suburb of…

Being awarded the Prize in Economic Sciences in Memory of Alfred Nobel is a beautiful, fairy-tale experience, from beginning to end. It is not, however, conducive to research, writing, teaching, or indeed to any ordinary academic work. Instead, one is besieged by hundreds – indeed thousands – of demands to appear and speak at events…

In the winter of 1968, Sten Thore, who was then a professor of economics at the Norwegian School of Economics and Business Administration (abbreviated NHH in Norwegian), where I was finishing my three undergraduate years, made me an offer that would change dramatically the path I was to take for the rest of my life.…

I was born in Swansea in the Principality of Wales in September 1934 and named Clive William John Granger. The “William John” names were traditional Granger boy’s names and my mother liked the name Clive because some popular musician at the time had it. My father, Edward John Granger, and with his wife Evelyn (both…

The early years to 1975I was born Vernon Lomax Smith in Wichita, on the flat plains of Kansas, January 1, 1927 in the years leading to the Great Depression. Like many of my generation I am a product of the strange circumstances of survival, and of successes built on tragedy. This narrative is written from…

Early yearsI was born in Tel Aviv, in what is now Israel, in 1934, while my mother was visiting her extended family there; our regular domicile was in Paris. My parents were Lithuanian Jews, who had immigrated to France in the early 1920s and had done quite well. My father was the chief of research…

I was born in Gary, Indiana, at the time, a major steel town on the southern shores of Lake Michigan, on February 9, 1943. Both of my parents were born within six miles of Gary, early in the century, and continued to live in the area until 1997. I sometimes thought that my peregrinations made…