Shy Norwegian Wins Nobel in Economics

Norwegian Trygve Haavelmo won the 1989 Nobel Prize in economics today and disappeared from public view, saying that he did not approve of such awards.

Neighbors said he probably had gone for a walk in the forest.

The modest and introverted professor, who fathered modern economic forecasting, drove off from his apartment in an Oslo suburb not long after the award was made public, neighbors told the Norwegian news agency NTB.

When colleagues arrived to congratulate him, Haavelmo, 77, was no longer there. He had been refusing to answer the phone for some time.

“I don’t like the idea of such prizes,” he told Reuters in a telephone interview immediately after the award was announced.

“I am not going to talk about this on the phone and I haven’t thought it through. Don’t write anything,” he said, clearly annoyed at being disturbed at his home.

Colleagues at the University of Oslo celebrated the award with champagne and cake.

Haavelmo was awarded the $455,000 prize by the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences for his work on showing that mathematical probabilities could be used to predict the puzzling shifts in the economy.

Haavelmo’s work in the early 1940s pioneered the field of econometrics, which introduced statistical probability to economic forecasting, the academy said.

The academy said Haavelmo’s theories overcame the problems economists faced because they were unable to test their ideas in the same ways as scientists who work in laboratories.

Economists also could not weed out the influence of millions of individual decisions that people and companies make that disturb the models devised by theorists.

Haavelmo overcame these difficulties by introducing the idea of statistical probability.

“He also showed that misleading interpretations of individual relations due to interdependence cannot be avoided unless all relations in a theoretical model are estimated simultaneously,” the academy said.

In such areas as investment theories and economic development, “Haavelmo’s approach has resulted in influential and far-reaching contributions,” the academy said.

The approach also has helped in the analysis of macroeconomic fluctuations, fiscal policies, and price theory, it said.

Haavelmo went to the United States on a Rockefeller grant in 1939 and studied at Harvard, where he presented his doctoral thesis on econometrics in 1941. He became a professor at the University of Chicago and worked for the Norwegian Trade Commission.

He returned to Norway in 1947 and has been at Oslo University since 1948.

The economics prize was the third of this year’s Nobel prizes to be announced. The physics and chemistry awards will be made Thursday.