Sylvia Nasar writes in Sunday’s
New York Times:
“On a late October morning,
Robert Alexander Mundell sat
Buddha-like amid stylish clutter
in his Claremont Avenue apartment,
two blocks from Columbia
University in Manhattan. The magic
moment when, amid fairy-tale pomp,
he will receive from the King of
Sweden the heavy gold medal
engraved with Alfred Nobel’s stern
profile was still weeks away.
“But life had already changed
profoundly for Mundell, 67, the
flamboyant Canadian-born economist
whose ideas paved the way for the
euro, the European currency.
“Since the announcement of the
prize two weeks earlier,
The Wall Street Journal had
already described him as more
important than Keynes, a television
network had filmed a documentary
on his life and 3,000 e-mail
messages had clogged his “in” box.
Invitations were pouring in so fast
on this particular morning that
his wife, Valerie Natsios,
desperate for the last hour to take
a shower, couldn’t leave the
phone: It wouldn’t stop ringing.
“Mundell, who “half expected”
the prize for some 15 years, had
already decided how he would
spend the nearly $1 million prize
(to complete the renovation of
his Tuscan palazzo, once featured
in Architectural Digest,
and to buy a pony for his
2-year-old son, Nicholas). And he
had already decided that he would
have the honorarium transferred
to his bank account in euros,
because he thinks the euro,
though sinking of late, is bound
to appreciate against the
dollar.
“But one detail appeared to
have escaped the man who, during
the Reagan presidency, became the
intellectual guru of the
supply-side tax revolution:
‘You mean … ‘ he asked, a tiny
frown now evident on the
capacious brow, ‘it’s taxed?’
“The world’s great economic
thinkers aspire to the Bank of
Sweden Prize in Economic Sciences
in Memory of Alfred Nobel for
some of the same reasons that
actors hanker after the Academy
Award and athletes hope to enter
the Hall of Fame. ‘People like
crowns,’ said Mundell, who will
receive this year’s prize on
Friday.
“No one has ever refused the
economics prize, which was added
to the five original Nobel prizes
in 1968, although one laureate,
Gunnar Myrdal, said publicly
that he would have done so had
he not been so sleepy when the
predawn call came from Stockholm,
and another winner seriously
considered turning it down
because a friend’s work had been
ignored.”
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