Daniel L. McFadden
[img]http://www.qhltw.com/pic/200806/29/20080629092650_1.jpg[/img]My wife Beverlee Tito Simboli and I married in 1962. We have threegrown children, Nina, Robert, and Raymond, and three grandchildren,Emily, Anne, and Daniel William. Beverlee is a photographer who is bestknown for her large-format Polaroid works with industrial and abstractsubjects. She is the daughter of Raymond Simboli, who immigrated fromItaly to Pittsburgh, PA, and was a professor of art in the School ofArchitecture at Carnegie-Mellon University. My daughter Nina has a B.A.in child psychology and is the executive chef for a corporation inTucson, Arizona. Robert received his Ph.D. in material science fromCarnegie-Mellon University, and heads a research group in the Intelresearch labs. Raymond received an MBA from the University ofCalifornia, Berkeley, with specialization in technology management anddirects software development at the Excite AtHome Company. Emily andAnne are Robert's daughters, and Daniel William is Ray's son.
I was born in 1937 in North Carolina, the eldest son of Robert SainMcFadden and Alice Little McFadden. My father was raised in themountains of North Carolina, where the McFadden family first settled in1740. He had only four years of formal schooling, but was a lightningcalculator who at age 14 was hired to keep the books for the localbank. He was a gregarious man with a photographic memory for names,faces, and words. My mother was raised in a small Minnesota town on theSouth Dakota border. Her father Jim Little was born in Minnesota in1856, the son of an immigrant from Ireland. He spent his early years asa horse trader in Dakota Territory, and became a prosperous small-townbusinessman. My mother received a degree in architecture from theUniversity of Minnesota in 1922, and an MFA from Columbia. She movedfrom New York to an architectural practice in Ohio, and later joinedthe faculty at the University of Cincinnati. She was a quiet, generousperson with a fine mind for logic.
My parents met in 1929 when my mother was teaching for a semester atthe University of North Carolina. In 1936, she left university life inCincinnati and married my father. They settled on a remote farm inrural North Carolina, and led an unconventional life, with noelectricity or running water and little money. My father was a greatcollector and reader of books, and I grew up surrounded by his library.My mother became a high school mathematics teacher. Most of our foodwas grown on the farm. Neighbors were remote, and reading was theprimary recreation. I grew up planning to become a farm agent, or anovelist in the florid style of Thomas Wolfe. I was active in 4-H,winning a state championship for my soil conservation projects, andblue ribbons for my sheep and geese. I milked three to five cows eachday, and we sold butter, cottage cheese, peanuts, corn, and hay. Myparents taught me that to lead a virtuous life, I should be modest,take my satisfaction from work done well, and avoid being drawn intocompetition for status and rewards.
[b]2. Education[/b]
I attended rural North Carolina publicschools. I was a good student, and my teachers allowed me to readduring most of my classes, usually racing through four or five books aday. The offerings in my high school were limited, but I was able tocomplete correspondence courses in algebra and geometry with help frommy mother. During my junior year in high school in 1953, a policy wasinstituted of automatic suspension for students reported off-campus bypolice. I started a petition drive among my classmates demanding theright for judicial review. In that time and place, this was enough toget me suspended from school and gave me an opportunity to seek newhorizons. I worked for a season on an uncle's dairy farm in Minnesota,and at age 16 entered the University of Minnesota by examination. Atthis point, my interests had shifted to science. The deficiencies in mycollege preparatory training were quickly made up, and at age 19, Ireceived a B.S. in Physics with highest honors. While still anundergraduate, I was hired by Prof. John Winckler to work in his CosmicRay Laboratory. In this laboratory, I designed and built an X-raytelescope, and a very early transistorized computer for data processingand telemetry. I learned a great deal from this research experience,far more than I understood at the time, and this shaped myunderstanding of the scientific enterprise and the interaction oftheory and measurement.
Another job I had as an undergraduate was to program card sortersthat were being used to construct psychological tests. This led to agreat interest in psychological measurement. I continued my studies inphysics as a graduate student at Minnesota, but was strongly attractedto the study of human behavior. At that time, the Ford Foundationsponsored an ambitious Behavioral Science Training Program at Minnesotadesigned to produce scholars who spanned the social sciences. I gainedadmission to this program in 1958, and embarked on a course of studythat included the core Ph.D. courses in psychology, sociology,economics, anthropology, political science, mathematics, andstatistics, a total of more than 70 graduate-level courses. I worked asa research assistant for Professors Hal Kelley and Stanley Schacter inSocial Psychology, conducting experiments on behavior in the repeatedprisoner's dilemma game, and on the effects of mood-shifting drugs onsocial interaction. I developed an interest in mathematical models oflearning and choice, and found that at Minnesota the faculty with thegreatest interests in this subject were Professors John Chipman and LeoHurwicz in the Economics Department. To work with these professors, Imade economics the lead field in my behavioral science program, and in1960-61 did the course and exam requirements for the economics Ph.D. Iwas strongly influenced by Chipman and Hurwicz, particularly by theiremphasis on axiomatic development of economic theory and the power offormal models. The Ford Foundation program had an externship in thesummer before the last year of study, to give the trainees exposure toother research groups. I was sent to Stanford to work for ProfessorsKenneth Arrow and Marc Nerlove. While there, I had a brief interactionwith Prof. Hirofumi Uzawa that proved to be a pivotal point in myresearch training, giving me a dissertation topic, and, mostimportantly, a flash of understanding of how to use mathematics as aresearch tool.
[b]3. Academic career[/b]
Following the completion of my Ph.D. in1962, I went to the University of Pittsburgh as a Mellon post-doctoralfellow, and the following year I joined the faculty at the Universityof California, Berkeley. I continued my interests in choice behavior,but was now also interested rather broadly in the problem of linkingeconomic theory and measurement. I benefitted a great deal frominteraction with my colleagues Peter Diamond, Roy Radner, DaleJorgenson, and [url=http://nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/economics/laureates/1983/index.html][color=#0000ff]Gerard Debreu[/color][/url], with whom I shared many common interests.
In 1977, I moved to the economics faculty at MIT. In those days,Paul Samuelson, Robert Solow, and Franco Modigliani were intenselyactive, and intellectual life there was lively. I was given a chair inthe name of James Killian, the revered former president of MIT andscience advisor to President Eisenhower. In a conversation with Dr.Killian, I learned that his grandfather had owned the cotton mill inwhich my grandfather was the chief mechanic. When I related this to [url=http://nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/economics/laureates/1987/index.html][color=#0000ff]Bob Solow[/color][/url], he said, "So much for social mobility in America; after two generations, you are still a mechanic in Killian's mill."
MIT did not have a department of statistics, and in its place had aStatistics Research Center. In 1986, I became the Director, primarilybecause my own research relied on good resources in statistics.However, I did not prove administratively adept in improving MIT'sstatistics program, and in 1991 chose to return to Berkeley to takeadvantage of its resources in statistics, and to establish theEconometrics Laboratory, a facility devoted to improving statisticalcomputation for economics applications. I am the holder of the E.Morris Cox Chair, and the endowment from this chair has supported muchof my research.
In addition to my regular teaching appointments, I visited theUniversity of Chicago in 1966-67, Yale in 1976-77 as the Irving FisherResearch Professor, and California Institute of Technology in 1990 as aFairchild Fellow.
[b]4. Research[/b]
In 1964, I was working with a graduatestudent, Phoebe Cottingham, who had data on freeway routing decisionsof the California Department of Transportation, and was looking for away to analyze these data to study institutional decision-makingbehavior. I worked out for her an econometric model based on anaxiomatic theory of choice behavior developed by the psychologistDuncan Luce. Drawing upon the work of Thurstone and Marshak, I was ableto show how this model linked to the economic theory of choicebehavior. These developments, now called the multinomial logit modeland the random utility model for choice behavior, have turned out to bewidely useful in economics and other social sciences. They are used,for example, to study travel modes, choice of occupation, brand ofautomobile purchase, and decisions on marriage and number of children.
Over the years, I have written papers on a variety of topics ineconomics and choice theory, almost all having origins in appliedproblems. A common theme of my research has been an emphasis on tightlybinding economic theory and the problem of economic measurement andanalysis, and on developing theoretical and statistical tools thatexpand the options available to applied economists. I have a strongappreciation for elegant and innovative mathematics and statistics, butas a matter of scientific priority try to keep my research focused onconcrete applications, and provide templates for applied economists tofollow. I have benefitted from interactions with many colleagues andstudents over the years. Developments in my core research area ofchoice behavior have grown particularly from interactions withProfessors Peter Diamond and Moshe Ben-Akiva of MIT, Professor JamesHeckman of the University of Chicago, Professor Charles Manski ofNorthwestern, and Professor Kenneth Train of Berkeley.
In recent years, my research has concentrated on the deviations fromthe economic theory of choice, found particularly in the experiments incognitive psychology conducted by Danny Kahneman and Amos Tversky, andtheir implications for economic analysis and the interpretation ofeconomic data. I have been studying how people answer questions ineconomic surveys, and have been developing methods for conductingsurveys and experiments on the internet to study these issues. Withsupport from the National Institute on Aging of the National Instituteof Health, I have been working on the economic status of elderlyAmericans, and looking at questions such as the adequacy of housingarrangements, financial planning, and the delivery and cost of healthservices. I find, for example, that the elderly on average hold on totheir assets too long, rather than converting them to income, becausethey are unrealistically optimistic about the length of remaining life.
[b]5. Personal interests[/b]
My main avocation, almost a secondvocation, is farming. Beverlee and I own a small farm and vineyard inthe Napa Valley. We grow and sell grapes, and make wine for our ownuse. We also grow and sell figs and olive oil. We have five cows, threeducks, and eleven chickens. I find that farm work clears the mind, andthe vineyard is a great place to prove theorems.
[b]6. The Nobel Prize[/b]
I am amazed to win this prize, anddelighted that it is shared with Jim Heckman, an old friend with whom Ihave exchanged ideas over three decades, and whose work is a constantsource of ideas and inspiration for me. I am very pleased that theNobel committee has recognized the scientific value ofmicroeconometrics. I regret that two great scientists, Zvi Grilichesand Amos Tversky, who made giant contributions to economics and to myown research, did not live long enough to receive this prize before me.A great deal of credit for what I have achieved over my career goes toBeverlee and my family, who accepted gracefully my dedication toresearch and provided the perspective needed to balance economics andlife. I am donating the prize money to the East Bay CommunityFoundation, and will direct it to be used to promote arts and education.[p=30, 2, left]From [i][url=http://nobelprize.org/nobelfoundation/publications/lesprix.html][color=#0000ff]Les Prix Nobel[/color][/url]. The Nobel Prizes 2000[/i], Editor Tore Frängsmyr, [Nobel Foundation], Stockholm, 2001 [/p][p=30, 2, left]This autobiography/biography was written at the time of the award and later published in the book series [url=http://nobelprize.org/nobelfoundation/publications/lesprix.html][i][color=#0000ff]Les Prix Nobel[/color][/i][/url][i]/[url=http://nobelprize.org/nobelfoundation/publications/lectures/index.html][color=#0000ff]Nobel Lectures[/color][/url][/i].The information is sometimes updated with an addendum submitted by theLaureate. To cite this document, always state the source as shown above.[/p]
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