Akerlof, George Arthur (born 1940)

Abstract

George Akerlof’s father came to the United States from Sweden to obtain a Ph.D. at the University of Pennsylvania, and remained in the country to pursue a career as a research chemist. He met George’s mother while she was a graduate student in chemistry. Hers was an academic family. George’s great grandfather was among the earliest graduates from the University of California at Berkeley (in 1873), and his grandfather also graduated from Berkeley. Other members on that side of the family also established successful academic careers. George grew up on the East Coast, where his father held a series of posts, variously at Yale University, at the Mellon Institute in Pittsburgh and at Princeton University, before running his own independent research firm in the Princeton area. Indeed, it was witnessing the uncertainty surrounding his father’s continuing employment, dependent as it was on securing government research grants, which first turned George Akerlof’s mind to macroeconomic themes such as unemployment. As an undergraduate at Yale he majored in mathematics and economics, and in the fall of 1962 he entered graduate school at MIT, where he had the good fortune to find himself one of an exceptionally talented cohort of students.