Let's hear it for Al Gore and Leonid Hurwicz. Gore, you knew, whether you agreed with him or not. But until yesterday, Hurwicz was decidedly more obscure, despite his 56 years at the University of Minnesota Department of Economics and his 90-plus years on Earth.
The personal fame of both men aside, it's their work that earned each a Nobel Prize, and which merits attention for affecting the lives of everyone on the planet.
By now, nearly everyone is aware of global warming, thanks in part to the warnings of the former U.S. vice president, particularly in his Oscar-winning documentary, "An Inconvenient Truth." Anyone still doubting the reality of global warming need only remember the brown Christmas in Duluth last year and an 80-degree October day two weeks ago. If that isn't enough, then consider the findings of the nearly 3,000 scientists from 130 countries comprising the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, the no-nonsense group that shared the Nobel Peace Prize with Gore.
The work of Hurwicz, who shared his Nobel in economics with Eric Maskin of Princeton, N.J., and Roger Myerson of the University of Chicago, is more difficult to wrap a non-Nobel-laureate mind around. The Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences cited the trio for "having laid the foundations of mechanism-design theory," a discipline of economics the British Guardian Unlimited called "highly abstract and mathematical." Bloomberg News took a whack at defining the theories as those "that analyze imperfections in the marketplace and help set rules for transactions," while the Wall Street Journal explained them as allowing "ways to make interactions between buyers and sellers with private information more efficient." The Journal went on to say the research "has influenced the design of auctions for everything from Treasury bonds to tchotchkes on eBay."
So it does affect you.
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For his part, the Russian-born Hurwicz, who picked up, along with other academic credentials, a law degree in Warsaw before fleeing the Nazis in 1938, has influenced thousands in Minnesota since joining the U in 1951. Among his doctoral students was Daniel McFadden, who went on to win the Nobel in economics in 2000.
Regarding his own win, Hurwicz said he thought at first the 6 a.m. call Monday was "somebody's idea of a joke."
Kind of like a brown Christmas in Duluth. Both, however, are for real.
