George Akerlof

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George Akerlof bigraphy, stories - Economist

George Akerlof : biography

June 17, 1940 –

George Arthur Akerlof (born June 17, 1940) is an American economist and Koshland Professor of Economics at the University of California, Berkeley. He won the 2001 Nobel Prize in Economics (shared with Michael Spence and Joseph E. Stiglitz).

Address to American Economic Association

In his 2007 presidential Address to the American Economic Association, Akerlof proposed natural norms that decision makers have for how they should behave. In this lecture Akerlof proposed a new agenda for macroeconomics with inclusion of those norms.

He is a trustee of the Economists for Peace and Security, and co-director of the Social Interactions, Identity and Well-Being program at the Canadian Institute for Advanced Research (CIFAR). He is in the advisory board of the Institute for New Economic Thinking. He was elected a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 1985.

Personal life

Akerlof was born in New Haven, Connecticut, United States, the son of Rosalie (née Hirschfelder) and Gosta Akerlof, who was a chemist and inventor. His mother was Jewish, from a family that had immigrated from Germany. His father was a Swedish immigrant., . Akerlof graduated from the Lawrenceville School. Accessed March 12, 2011. "The Princeton Country Day School ended at grade nine. At that point most of my classmates dispersed among different New England prep schools. Both for financial reasons and also because they preferred that I stay at home, my family sent me down the road to the Lawrenceville School." from which he received the School’s highest award (the Lawrenceville Medal) in 2002, and received his B.A. degree from Yale University in 1962, and his Ph.D. degree from MIT in 1966, and has taught at the London School of Economics. His wife Janet Yellen is the current Vice Chairman of the Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System and a professor of economics at UC Berkeley, and was the former President and CEO of the Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco and former Chair of President Bill Clinton’s Council of Economic Advisors., Economists for Peace and Security , White House Council of Economic Advisors]. His son Robert Akerlof is currently an Associate Professor of Economics at the University of Warwick.

Professor Akerlof has spoken at many distinguished events, including Warwick Economics Summit in February 2012 with a talk entitled "Phishing for Phools".http://www.warwickeconomicssummit.com/2012/programme Warwick Economics Summit 2012 Programme

Reproductive technology shock

In the late 1990s Akerlof’s ideas attracted the attention of some on both sides of the debate over legal abortion. In articles appearing in The Quarterly Journal of Economics, The Economic Journal, and other forums Akerlof described a phenomenon that he labeled "reproductive technology shock." He contended that the new technologies that had helped to spawn the late twentieth century sexual revolution, modern contraceptives and legal abortion, had not only failed to suppress the incidence of out-of-wedlock childbearing but also had actually worked to increase it. According to Akerlof, for women who did not use them, these technologies had largely transformed the old paradigm of socio-sexual assumptions, expectations, and behaviors in ways that were especially disadvantageous. For example, the availability of legal abortion now allowed men to view their offspring as the deliberate product of female choice rather than as the chance product of sexual intercourse. Thus, it encouraged biological fathers to reject not only the notion of an obligation to marry the mother but also the very idea of a paternal obligation.

While Akerlof did not recommend legal restrictions on either abortion or the availability of contraceptives, his analysis seemed to lend support to those who did. Thus, a scholar strongly associated with liberal and Democratic-leaning policy positions, has been approvingly cited by conservative and Republican-leaning analysts and commentators.