Maurice Allais

In 1992, Allais criticised the Maastricht Treaty for its excessive emphasis on free trade. He also expressed reservations on the single European currency. In 2005, he expressed similar reservations concerning the European Constitution.

On the first page, he dedicates his book La mondialisation: destruction des emplois et de la croissance (1990), Globalization: destruction of jobs and growth, "To the countless victims worldwide of the free-trade ideology, ideology as fatal as it is erroneous, and to all those who are not blind to some partisan passion". Allais believes that Ricardo's theory is valid only in a steady state, but disappears when the specializations evolve and when the capital is mobile.

Allais’s Hereditary, Relativist and Logistic (HRL) theory of monetary dynamics contains an original theory of expectations formation that is a genuine alternative to both adaptive and rational expectations. It was praised by Milton Friedman in 1968 with the following words: "This work [the HRL formulation] introduces a very basic and important distinction between psychological time and chronological time. It is one of the most important and original paper that has been written for a long time … for its consideration of the problem of the formation of expectations". Allais's contribution has nevertheless been "lost": it has been absent from the debate about expectations.

Although he participated in the Mont Pelerin Society, Allais was convinced of an affinity between liberalism and socialism, stating: "‘For the true liberal, as for the true socialist, it matters little whether the means of production are privately or collectively owned, so long as the essential goals they pursue, namely efficiency and justice, are achieved." He advocated "competitive planning" as a "possible synthesis of liberalism and socialism." In 1959, he and other French members of Mont Pelerin such as Jacques Rueff established an organization called Mouvement pour une société libre which spoke readily of a social liberalism that would go "beyond laissez-faire and socialism."

Besides his career in economics, he performed experiments between 1952 and 1960 in the fields of gravitation, special relativity and electromagnetism, to investigate possible links between the fields. He reported three effects:

In 1947, in the second part of his work Économie et Intérêt, Allais introduced time and currency and thus tackled the dynamics and growth of capitalist economies. Again, he made several proposals, that would be later attributed to other, better-known economists. He introduced the first overlapping generations model(OLG model) (later popularized and attributed to Paul Samuelson in 1958), introduced the golden rule of optimal growth before Trevor Swan and Edmund Phelps, show that an interest rate equal to the growth rate maximizes consumption. He also described the transaction demand for money rule before William Baumol and James Tobin

Born in Paris, France, Allais attended the Lycée Lakanal, graduated from the École Polytechnique in Paris and studied at the École nationale supérieure des mines de Paris. His academic and other posts have included being Professor of Economics at the École Nationale Supérieure des Mines de Paris (since 1944) and Director of its Economic Analysis Centre (since 1946). In 1949, he received the title of doctor-engineer from the University of Paris, Faculty of Science. He also held teaching positions at various institutions, including at the University of Paris X–Nanterre. His first works oriented him towards the sciences of the concrete and the experiments of fundamental physics, on which he will also publish numerous works, notably on pendular oscillations and the laws of gravitation. It's after a trip in 1933 to the United States during the Great Depression, that he decides to make the economy. Allais died at his home in Saint-Cloud, near Paris, at the age of 99.

His first book develops the microeconomic aspect. With Traité d'économie pure, which he wrote between January 1941 and July 1943, based on his contributions, along with Hicks and Samuelson, to the concept of neoclassical synthesis. He anticipates several of the propositions and theorems put forward by Hicks, Samuelson and others, sometimes giving them a more general and rigorous formulation. In particular, he demonstrates the equivalence theorems that Kenneth Arrow and Gerard Debreu will find in 1954: "Every equilibrium situation in a market economy is a situation of maximum efficiency, and reciprocally, every situation of maximum efficiency Is a equilibrium situation in a market economy. " The market thus ensures economic efficiency and optimal distribution of income in the nation. At the same time, Samuelson exposed the process of trial and error which leads to the equilibrium of markets.

He was also responsible for early work in Behavioral economics, which in the US is generally attributed to Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky. In the 1940s, Allais worked on "decision theory" (or "theory of choice") under uncertainty and developed a theory of cardinal utility. Due to war conditions and his commitment to publish in French, his work was undertaken independently of Theory of games and economic behavior developed by John von Neumann and Oskar Morgenstern. He formulated the Allais paradox in 1953, which questions the traditional model of rationality of choices and contradicts the expected utility hypothesis. It shows that when confronted with a lottery, an individual does not maximize his hoped-for gains, but rather aims at certainty.

In his opinion, crisis and globalization are linked: "The financial and banking crisis which, is only the spectacular symptom of a deeper economic crisis: the deregulation of competition in the global labor market". "Current unemployment is due to this total liberalization of trade[...] As such, it constitutes a major foolishness, starting from an unbelievable contradiction. Just as attributing the crisis of 1929 to protectionist causes is a historical contradiction. The true origin was already in the careless development of credit in the years preceding it."

Maurice Félix Charles Allais (31 May 1911 – 9 October 2010) was a French physicist and economist, the 1988 winner of the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences "for his pioneering contributions to the theory of markets and efficient utilization of resources", along with John Hicks (Value and Capital, 1939) and Paul Samuelson (The Foundations of Economic Analysis, 1947), to neoclassical synthesis. They formalize the self-regulation of markets, that Keynes refuted, while reiterating some of his ideas.