Armen Alchian died this morning at age 98. He taught me microeconomics my first quarter at UCLA, in the fall of 1972. At the time, he was 58 and in his prime. That was the most demanding economics course I ever took in my life and, not unrelated, the course I learned the most from. I have an obituary ready to go that I sent to the Wall Street Journal and so I’ll be brief here for now. If you want to know more about the importance of his work, read my bio of him in The Concise Encyclopedia of Economics and read Fred McChesney’s Econlib piece on him. In Fred’s piece, by the way, Fred notes that Alchian was one of the first practitioners of the “event study” that financial economists have found so useful.
Also, Armen wrote the piece on property rights for the Encyclopedia.
UPDATE: Bob Higgs’s tribute to Armen.
READER COMMENTS
Harold Mulherin
Feb 19 2013 at 2:29pm
I echo your comments. I was there in fall 1980 and Professor Alchian was still in prime form.
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