John Harsanyi
John Charles Harsanyi (actually János Károly Harsanyi; * May 29, 1920 in Budapest, † August 9, 2000 in Berkeley / California ) was a Hungarian- American economist. He received the 1994 Nobel Prize in Economics.
Biography
School time
In Budapest, he attended the grammar German -speaking Lutheran high school, one of the best schools in Hungary. Even John von Neumann and Wigner Eugene Paul (Nobel Prize in Physics, 1963) were students here. In 1937 he graduated. In the same year he won a national math competition.
Studies and wartime
The wish of his parents, he studied accordingly pharmacy. The then political situation in Germany, which already aired on Hungary, and the fact that he as a student first had to do military service that led him to quickly take a course of study.
Only when in March 1944, German troops occupied Hungary, he served from May to November 1944 in the military. After the captivity it was the deportation before an Austrian concentration camp. But he escaped in November 1944. Harsanyi was then shelter in a Jesuit monastery.
The experience of fascism also influenced his later ethical work. In it, he argued for an ethic that can be measured concretely in a demonstrable benefit and not in the hands of any (political) institutions and thus can quickly turn into fanaticism.
Postwar period and Promotion
After the war, in 1946, he enrolled again at the University of Budapest in order his doctorate in philosophy - to make - with minors in sociology and psychology. In June 1947 he received the doctorate. From September 1947 to June 1948 he worked at the Institute of Sociology. There he also met his future wife, Anne Klauber know.
Second escape from Hungary
As a convinced anti- Marxist Harsanyi had to give up his work at the University of Budapest in June 1948 and left (along with Anne) in April 1950 Hungary illegally. After a stay of several months in Austria both emigrated in December 1950 after Sydney, Australia. There they got married on January 2, 1951.
Time in Australia
Harsanyi Hungarian financial statements were not recognized in Australia, he studied, in the evening, after his factory work, economics. In 1953 he received his M. A. and 1954 a teaching position at the University of Queensland in Brisbane. In 1956 he got a grant from the Rockefeller Foundation, which enabled him to study for two years at Stanford University and a PhD in just economics. In 1958 he returned to Australia at the Australian National University in Canberra, where he got an attractive job.
Moved to the United States
In Australia, however, Harsanyi soon felt isolated as a game theorist, and so he returned (with the help of Kenneth Arrow, Nobel Prize for Economics in 1972, and James Tobin, Nobel Prize in Economics in 1981 ) in the United States, at the Wayne State University in Detroit, back. Later he became a professor at the Business School of the University of California at Berkeley. There was also his only child, his son, Tom, was born.
After the fall of 1990, he repeatedly visited his home country of Hungary.
Scientific Life
Scientifically, JC Harsanyi employed in the years 1956-1973 mainly with game theory. He has published several writings on utilitarian ethics, primarily using rational decision for moral problems. The well-known principle in the moral philosophy of the average benefit goes back to him, as well as the direct probability model that describes before the philosopher John Rawls the thought experiment of the " veil of ignorance".
At the University of California, Los Angeles ( UCLA), he took over 1964-1990 a teaching and got 1994 ( along with John F. Nash, Princeton University and Reinhard Selten, Rheinische Friedrich- Wilhelms-Universität Bonn) the price of Economics, Swedish Riksbank in memory of Alfred Nobel, which his services were honored in terms of non-cooperative game theory.