Andreu Mas-Colell (Barcelona, 1944) completed his undergraduate studies in the economics faculties at Barcelona and Valladolid universities. He then moved to the University of Minnesota, earning his PhD there in 1972. After two years in the departments of Economics and Mathematics at the University of California, Berkeley (1972-1981), he joined Harvard University (1981-1995) as Professor of Economics, a post he now holds at Pompeu Fabra University in Barcelona. He is also Director of the Research Centre for International Economics and Chairman of the Barcelona Graduate School of Economics.
From 2009 to 2010, he served as Secretary General of the European Research Council, and with the Catalan Government he has held the positions of Minister of Universities, Research and the Information Society (April 2000 to December 2003) and Minister of Economy and Knowledge (December 2010 to January 2016).
A member of the European Academy of Sciences and Arts, he holds honorary doctorates from the universities of Alicante, Toulouse, HEC (Paris) and Universidad Nacional del Sur (Argentina). He has received the Rey Juan Carlos Prize in Economics (1988) and in 2006 was awarded both the Pascual Madoz National Research Prize and the Creu de Sant Jordi.
For Andreu Mas-Colell, sharing the Frontiers of Knowledge Award in Economics with Hugo Sonnenschein (New York, United States; 1941) only adds to its luster. Professionally, but also at a human level. For while their age difference may now be small, the relationship between these esteemed colleagues and collaborators dates from when Mas-Colell was Sonnenschein’s student at the University of Minnesota from 1968 to 1972.
These four years, which concluded with Mas-Colell obtaining his PhD, are still fresh in the memory of the Catalan economist, who singles out in his former teacher his “analytical subtlety and the extreme elegance of his insights, perceptions and deductive work. You may think you know a subject until you hear Hugo Sonnenschein explain it. At that moment, it is not your understanding that you doubt. You still understand but with a clarity that wasn’t there before, because Hugo always goes that little bit deeper.”
Curiously Sonnenschein and Mas-Colell both arrived in the world of economics not by the complex operation of the game theory to which they would later devote so many hours of study, but by the elementary workings of chance. “When I started university,” Sonnenschein relates “I was an engineering student. I settled on engineering basically as a way to use math, because I never imagined that you could actually be a mathematician. I never even knew they existed, whereas there were several engineers in my family. And of course I never dreamt that I would go on to become an economist. To start with, because I didn’t know what an economist could do, since I had no idea of how math could be applied in economics.”
Mas-Colell has a similar tale to tell: “In my family’s social circles, the professions that counted were engineering and medicine. The latter, because one of my uncles, a very diligent student, was taking a medicine degree. I wasn’t keen on either. In fact at that time I leaned more towards the arts, but like most school students with good grades, ended up on the science side. Economics was a new degree that you could enroll for with science qualifications (unlike law, for instance, meaning a legal career was ruled out), so my parents, small business owners with a practical mindset, thought it was probably the sensible choice. I was also attracted by the social dimensions of the subject. In short, I became an economist partly through preference, after weighing up the pros and cons, and partly through circumstance. I made the right decision, but it could have gone otherwise. Overall, I think the European system makes us commit too soon to a specific career path.”
The two men set out to explore the furthest reaches of economics, in thrall to the imaginative possibilities thrown up by the wealth of strategies available: from information technology to philosophy by way of biology or psychology. But if there is one area where they have stood out above the rest, it is in the application of modern Aggregate Demand Theory as a tool for understanding business cycles, and the General Equilibrium Theory which, in the words of Hugo Sonnenschein, its first proponent, contends that “the value of a good to a given individual is determined by consumer preferences, technology and the distribution of wealth.”
All these elements interact in the same way water finds the same level in two interconnected containers. “The players involved generate a system of great mathematical complexity, and Andreu Mas-Colell and I have worked together to determine the exact nature of this complexity.” Mas-Colell takes up the narrative, selecting from their joint body of work “developments that show the robustness of the theory that runs from Adam Smith down to today’s generation of economists concerning what we call economic welfare, but also reveal a series of shortcomings in its predictive or dynamic properties.” A demanding research endeavor, supplemented by their work, both jointly and separately, to firmly ground the basic postulates of Walrasian Theory, taking earlier applications one step further in order to explore and coax out new and unsuspected dimensions – essential for its implementation by today’s economists – like the theories of social choice and mechanism design.
Andreu Mas-Colell has been Minister for Universities and Research with the Catalan Regional Government, after serving as commissioner in the same area. His academic career has taken him to various universities in Spain, including the Complutense in Madrid and the Autonomous University of Barcelona and, further afield, to Berkeley in California, Harvard and Bonn. Pending his return to teaching duties this fall at Pompeu Fabra University, Mas-Colell is again engaged in administrative matters as Secretary General of the European Research Council.
One imagines a quieter life for Hugo Sonnenschein on the campus of Chicago University, where he is President Emeritus and Distinguished Service Professor. His wife, Dr. Elizabeth Gunn, whom he met in 1957 at the University of Rochester, has given up the classroom and laboratory for the chairmanship of the “Know your Chicago” program. Sonnenschein, meantime, heads Van Kampen Mutual Funds and a number of non-profit organizations, as well as taking an active part in various scientific and philosophical societies.
