Maurice Allais

On 6 September 1960, at the age of almost fifty, Maurice Allais married Jacqueline Bouteloup. She was initially his student. Later from 1952 until her sudden death in 2003, she had been a close collaborator in all his projects. The couple had a daughter.

On October 9, 2010, Allais died of natural causes at his home in Saint-Cloud. He was then ninety-nine years old and was survived by his daughter.

The choice problem he designed in 1953 has been named ‘Allais Paradox’ in his honor. Through it, he showed that there was an inconsistency in the predictions of expected utility theory when it is compared with the actual observed choices.

Maurice Félix Charles Allais was born on 31 May 1911 into a working class family in Paris. His parents owned a small cheese shop in the city. It is not known if he had any siblings.

In August 1914, when he was barely three years old, his father was conscripted in the army and sent to fight in the First World War. Within months, he was taken prisoner by the Germans and kept in a POW camp in Germany, where he died of typhus on March 27, 1915.

Maurice was barely four years old then but the incident left a lifelong mark on his mind. Many believe his commitment to European Construction stemmed from such a personal bereavement.

Meanwhile in Paris, Maurice was raised by his mother under difficult conditions. As a result, he started his formal education in 1919, three years behind schedule, at a local state school in the rue d’Alésia. Here all his classmates were much junior to him.

Fortunately, the headmaster of the school allowed him to skip some classes. Thus by October 1921, he was able to catch up with other boys of the same age group and began his secondary education at the Lycée Lakanal in Sceaux in time.

On joining the service in October 1936, Maurice Allais was briefly posted at Public Works Ministry, where he worked on an economic enquiry going on in the coal market. Later in April 1937, he was promoted to the post of a senior civil service engineer and sent to Nantes.

Thus at the age of twenty-six, he was put in charge of Nantes Mines and Quarries Service, with a jurisdiction covering five departments. In addition, he was also required to supervise a number of controls, especially the railways.

In 1939, at the onset of the Second World War, he was recalled by the Alpine Army. As a Lieutenant, he was put in command of a heavy artillery battery and sent to fight in the area of Briancon in the Italian Front.

However, he saw real action only between 10 June 1940, the day Italy declared war on France and 25 June 1940, the day the armistice was signed. Thereafter in July 1940, he returned to his post at Nantes, which was already under German occupation.

During the Second World War, there was very little work at Nantes. Remembering what he experienced during the Great Depression in the USA, Maurice Allais began to contemplate on similar situations, trying to find an appropriate solution for it.

Subsequently from 1941, along with carrying out his administrative duties, he started teaching himself economics. He published his first work, titled ‘À la recherche d'une discipline économique’ (In Search of an Economic Discipline – Treatise on Pure Economics), two years later in 1943.

In the same year, he returned to Paris as the Director of le Bureau of Mines Documentation and Statistics. Concurrently from 1944, he became the Professor of Economic Analysis at Paris’s École Nationale Supérieure des Mines, a position he held until 1988.

Also from October 1946 to 1980, he was the Director of research at the Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique (C.N.R.S.) and the head of the Centre for Economic Analysis, an institute affiliated both to the École des Mines and to the C.N.R.S.

Apart from that, in 1947, Allais was appointed a professor at the Institute of Statistics at the University of Paris, a position he held up to 1968. As a result of such concurrent positions, he had to work very hard, clocking at least eighty hours per week.