Arnaud Diemer, Jérôme Lallement et Bertrand Munier (dir

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Arnaud Diemer, Jérôme Lallement et Bertrand
Munier (dir.), Maurice Allais et la science
économique Avec un hommage de Paul Samuelson,
une préface d’Yvon Gattaz et une introduction de
Roger Guesnerie, Paris, Clément Juglar, 2010
Jean-Sébastien Lenfant
OEconomia / Volume 2011 / Issue 01 / March 2011, pp 153 - 157
DOI: 10.4074/S2113520711011157, Published online: 11 May 2011
Link to this article: http://www.necplus.eu/abstract_S2113520711011157
How to cite this article:
Jean-Sébastien Lenfant (2011). OEconomia, 2011, pp 153-157 doi:10.4074/
S2113520711011157
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| Revue des livres/Book Review
Arnaud Diemer, Jérôme Lallement et Bertrand
Munier (dir.), Maurice Allais et la science
économique
Avec un hommage de Paul Samuelson, une préface
d’Yvon Gattaz et une introduction de Roger
Guesnerie, Paris, Clément Juglar, 2010.
Jean-Sébastien Lenfant∗
In 1988, Maurice Allais (1911-2010) was awarded the Nobel Prize
in Economics in Memory of Alfred Nobel. Yet the contributions of
Maurice Allais to economics and economic policy have received only
scattered attention (notably in the years following the Nobel award),
and this book is the first serious and collective attempt at appraising
his contributions to economics.
Given that some contributors to this volume were students,
disciples or just colleagues of Maurice Allais, and few were
convinced supporters of his theoretical battles (notably members
of the ARAIMA, an association dedicated to disseminating Allais’s
work), the general tone of the book might appear here and there to
lie outside the usual boundaries of academic articles. Contributions
or tributes by Samuelson, Boiteux, Malinvaud, Lesourne cohabitate
with more vindictive presentations of Allais’s insights (Bourcier
de Carbon on the hereditary and logistic approach to monetary
dynamics) against the Establishment, who is accused of a cynical
ignorance towards his contributions to economic theory. Clearly,
the reader will have to delve into about twenty contributions of
unequal length and interest. The whole set of articles provides a
good coverage of Allais’s involvement in practically all fields of
economic theory to which he contributed (theory of choice, general
equilibrium, regulation of public utilities, macroeconomic dynamics
and monetary economics) save time series analysis and overlapping
generation models (see Malinvaud (1986)). All the articles in this
volume contain useful information to those who wish to get an
overall idea of Allais’s involvement in economic theory, economic
∗ Université Lillle 1 Sciences et technologies
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expertise and economic policy. The usual image of Maurice Allais
as a convinced partisan of free competition with anti-conformist
tendencies will not be altered. Allais is not just a theoretician who
wrote academic articles and books; he also contributed constantly to
public debate with essays and pamphlets, and often took positions
at odds with the proponents of “laissez-faire” or globalization and
the advocates of central planning or Keynesian policies. A seminal
example of this independent attitude is when Allais, a founding
member of the Mont-Pèlerin Society, refused to sign the founding text
of the Society, because he disagreed with Hayek on the principle of
collective ownership. Allais was a convinced federalist and a partisan
of a unique monetary currency, he advocated for a reasonable degree
of protection in trade with underdeveloped countries, he favored the
idea of reducing uncertainty through indexing not only debts but
also wages. On all these issues, the reader will find rather complete
contributions.
On reading this book, one might hesitate between two contradictory feelings. The first is that, although sometimes original and
provocative, Allais’s ideas were actually discussed and debated
within academic circles and he was able to publish in its most
influential journals and answer to his critics. On this, it must be
noted that Allais was prone to asserting some superiority over his
contradictors. As Drèze (1989, 10) puts it: “Allais has never shied
away from controversy. Instead he has tended to assert his views
all the more forcefully when they seemed less readily accepted
—with little tendency to retreat or express doubts. Such an approach
has not always been conducive to effective communication and,
as a consequence, some potentially important contributions may
have been temporarily lost”. The second feeling is that most of
the contributions in the book tend to foster the representation of
Allais as an isolated scientist whose innovative and personal ideas
were too singular to be compared with what was going on in
economic theory. Whereas Allais’s work would have benefit from a
systematic comparative approach, most contributions to this book
offer monographic enquiries on different themes.
The book is divided into two parts, using the traditional division
between pure economics versus applied and practical economics.
This is certainly well justified, although it might have been possible
to devote a complete part to applied economics and a third one to
broader views on economic policy and the role of the State. I have
chosen to start our presentation from the end and then to proceed
backward.
Under the heading of applied economics, a number of contributions link Allais’s theoretical and practical recommendations.
Boiteux gives striking examples of Allais’s recommendations in rail
transportation price policy and in the withdrawal from coal extraction
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| Revue des livres/Book Review
activities. Bonnafous and Baumstark try to explain the specificity
of Allais’s theory of surplus and losses compared with Dupuit’s.
Guillaumont-Jeanneney discusses the theoretical foundations of Allais’s proposal for indexing liabilities and its implication for financial
stability. And Klotz provides a very nice article (“Les comptabilités de
Maurice Allais” —“Maurice Allais’s Accounting Systems”) showing
that Allais developed his own system of business accounting adapted
to the foundations of macroeconomics and macroeconomic dynamics.
He shows how Allais’s approach echoed much-debated issues of
the time, dealing with Kuznets, Haberler, Stone and the process of
normalization of National Accounting systems, and how he turned
them into something more.
Some contributions dealing with general economic policy issues
will help deepen the portrait of Allais as an original thinker,
who participated rather actively in public debates through articles
in non-academic journals and pamphlets, and who also tackled
sociological and political topics. The book contains a number of
original contributions by Diemer on European Federalism and fiscal
policies in Europe and also on income distribution, showing that
Allais was always sensitive to long-term effects of economic growth
on economic justice (equality of opportunities). On fiscal policies
and economic justice, a broader, comparative view would have
been useful (cf. Picavet, 2002). In 1948, Allais published Manifeste
économique et social pour les États-Unis d’Europe (Economic and Social
Manifesto for the United-States of Europe). As a convinced Federalist,
Allais wanted to develop economic cooperation and to go beyond
national conflicts of interests. Notably, a federalist government would
have control over a unique monetary currency. Dard gives a scholarly
view on Maurice Allais’s political stances through his contributions
to different journals. He focuses more particularly on his positions
regarding planning and economic liberalism in the reconstruction
period, and also regarding the Algerian War. Laurier presents Allais’s
ideas on free trade, protectionism and economic development. Allais
advocates the superiority of free trade as long as it does not
jeopardize long-term conditions for social and economic stability. For
instance, food self-sufficiency imposes some limits to international
specialization. Also, Allais entrusts the State with responsabilities
concerning long-term expectations for profitable activities. On the
topic of international trade, it is regrettable that the reader is not
able to judge to what extent Allais’s proposals are grounded on a
theoretical model, since Laurier does not mention Allais’s 1961 model
(Allais, 1961).
Under the heading of theoretical economics the first part of the
book deals with fundamental contributions by Allais to economic
theory. Munier provides a useful synthesis of Allais’s contributions
to decision under uncertainty and to cardinal utility, which he links
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to recent developments. It is a pity that the presentation of the
theory of maximum social efficiency (or distributable surplus) is
dispersed among three articles (Béraud, Alcouffe, and Bonnafous
and Baumstark) whereas it might have been the centerpiece of the
book, a clue for understanding Allais’s divergences from mainstream
neoclassical economics (in particular his rejection of a general
hypothesis of convexity and perfect competition). Notably, Alcouffe’s
presentation does not discuss the mathematical apparatus of the
theory of maximum efficiency (cf. Guesnerie (1984), Bronsard and
Salvas-Bronsard, (1988)), which was also an important contribution
to the disequilibrium dynamics of general equilibrium. Béraud offers
a good introduction to Allais’s theory of general equilibrium, and
he highlights (although too briefly) the differences with Hicks (1939)
(for complementary discussion, see Weintraub (1991) and Lenfant
(2005)). Finally, two other articles confront Allais’s ideas with those
of his contemporaries. Gomez (“Qu’est-ce que la monnaie ? Les courants
contemporains et Maurice Allais”) offers a meticulous presentation
of Allais’s (essentially psychological) definition of money and of
his models of demand for money, and he confronts them with
alternative models, but curiously does not mention Baumol and
Tobin’s model of optimal cash balance (cf. Baumol and Tobin (1989)).
Lastly, Jérôme Lallement provides the first epistemological appraisal
of Allais’s work. Although his epistemology had a strong Popperian
flavor (with a constant reference to empirical evidence), Allais also
highlighted the distinction between the corroboration of a theory and
the more usual practice of applying it. Without knowing it, Allais
was addressing points similar to those discussed by Friedman and
Leontief.
Sterdyniac (2009) recently remarked that: “It is not easy to
appraise Maurice Allais’s work”. Undoubtedly, this book will help to
draw some connections between different aspects of his work, even
though it would have benefited from more critical and comparative
contributions.
References
Allais, Maurice. 1961. Un Paradoxe de la Théorie du Commerce
International. In Money, Growth and Methodology, in honor of
Professor Johan Akerman, Hugo Hegeland (ed.), C. W. K. Gleerup,
Publishers, 337–50.
Baumol, William Jack and James Tobin. 1989. The Optimal Cash
Balance Proposition: Maurice Allais’ Priority. Journal of Economic
Literature, 27(3), 1160–1162.
Bronsard, Camille and Lise Salvas-Bronsard. 1988. Sur trois contributions d’Allais. L’Actualité économique, 64(4), 481–492.
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Drèze, Jacques. 1989. Maurice Allais and the French Marginalist
School. The Scandinavian Journal of Economics, 91(1), 5–16.
Grandmont, Jean-Michel. 1989. Report on Maurice Allais’ Scientific
Work. The Scandinavian Journal of Economics, 91(1), 17–28.
Guesnerie, Roger. 1984, Review of: La Théorie générale des surplus by
Maurice Allais. The Journal of Political Economy, 92(4), 780–783.
Lenfant, Jean-Sébastien. 2005. Psychologie individuelle et stabilité
d’un équilibre général concurrentiel dans le Traité d’économie pure
de Maurice Allais. Revue économique, 56(4), 855–888.
Malinvaud, Edmond. 1986. Maurice Allais, précurseur méconnu des
modèles à générations renouvelées. In Marcel Boiteux, Thierry de
Montbrial et Bertrand Munier (eds.). Marchés, capital et incertitudes:
essais en l’honneur de Maurice Allais, Paris, Economica, 1986.
Munier, Bertrand. 1989. Portée et signification de l’œuvre de Maurice
Allais, Prix Nobel d’Economie 1988. Revue d’économie politique,
99(1), 1–27.
Picavet, Emmanuel. 2002. Capital et imposition selon les critères de
justice. Archives de philosophie du droit, 46, 291–310.
Sterdyniac, Henry 2009 Maurice Allais, itinéraire d’un économiste
français. OFCE WP-2009–23.
Weintraub, Roy. 1991. Allais Stability, and Liapounov Theory. History
of Political Economy, 23(3), 383–418.
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