Hendrik Samuel Houthakker (December 31, 1924 – April 15, 2008) was a prominent American economist.

Life and career

Houthakker was born in

Amsterdam Amsterdam ( , , , lit. ''The Dam on the River Amstel'') is the capital and most populous city of the Netherlands, with The Hague being the seat of government. It has a population of 907,976 within the city proper, 1,558,755 in the urban ar ...

to a Dutch-Jewish family. His father was a prominent art dealer. As a teenager he lived through the Nazi occupation of the Netherlands and, according to an interview he gave to the ''

Valley News The ''Valley News'' (and ''Sunday Valley News'') is a seven-day morning daily newspaper based in Lebanon, New Hampshire, covering the Upper Valley region of New Hampshire and Vermont, in the United States. Although the newspaper's offices are ...

'', was once arrested by the

Gestapo The (), abbreviated Gestapo (; ), was the official secret police of Nazi Germany and in German-occupied Europe. The force was created by Hermann Göring in 1933 by combining the various political police agencies of Prussia into one orga ...

but escaped and was sheltered for some months by a

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family. He completed his graduate work at the

University of Amsterdam The University of Amsterdam (abbreviated as UvA, nl, Universiteit van Amsterdam) is a public research university located in Amsterdam, Netherlands. The UvA is one of two large, publicly funded research universities in the city, the other being ...

in 1949. He taught at

Stanford University Stanford University, officially Leland Stanford Junior University, is a private research university in Stanford, California. The campus occupies , among the largest in the United States, and enrolls over 17,000 students. Stanford is conside ...

from 1954 to 1960 and then completed the rest of his career at

Harvard University Harvard University is a private Ivy League research university in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Founded in 1636 as Harvard College and named for its first benefactor, the Puritan clergyman John Harvard, it is the oldest institution of highe ...

. In 1961 he was elected as a

Fellow of the American Statistical Association Like many other academic professional societies, the American Statistical Association (ASA) uses the title of Fellow of the American Statistical Association as its highest honorary grade of membership. The number of new fellows per year is limited ...

. Houthakker served on President

Nixon Richard Milhous Nixon (January 9, 1913April 22, 1994) was the 37th president of the United States, serving from 1969 to 1974. A member of the Republican Party, he previously served as a representative and senator from California and was ...

Council of Economic Advisers The Council of Economic Advisers (CEA) is a United States agency within the Executive Office of the President established in 1946, which advises the President of the United States on economic policy. The CEA provides much of the empirical rese ...

from 1969 to 1971, where he advocated replacing the International Monetary Fund's pegged exchange rate system with a flexible peg. Houthakker's contributions to economic theory have been summarized by Pollak (1990). He is particularly well known for the Strong Axiom of Revealed Preference, to which his name is often attached. This paper reconciles

Paul Samuelson Paul Anthony Samuelson (May 15, 1915 – December 13, 2009) was an American economist who was the first American to win the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences. When awarding the prize in 1970, the Swedish Royal Academies stated that he " ...

revealed preference Revealed preference theory, pioneered by economist Paul Anthony Samuelson in 1938, is a method of analyzing choices made by individuals, mostly used for comparing the influence of policies on consumer behavior. Revealed preference models assume th ...

approach to demand theory with the earlier

ordinal utility In economics, an ordinal utility function is a function representing the preferences of an agent on an ordinal scale. Ordinal utility theory claims that it is only meaningful to ask which option is better than the other, but it is meaningless to ...

approach of

Eugene Slutsky Evgeny "Eugen" Evgenievich Slutsky (russian: Евге́ний Евге́ньевич Слу́цкий; – 10 March 1948) was a Russian and Soviet mathematical statistician, economist and political economist. Work in economics Slutsky is principa ...

and

Sir John Hicks Sir John Richards Hicks (8 April 1904 – 20 May 1989) was a British economist. He is considered one of the most important and influential economists of the twentieth century. The most familiar of his many contributions in the field of economic ...

, by showing that demand functions satisfy his Strong Axiom if and only if they can be generated by maximising a set of preferences that are "well-behaved" in the sense that they satisfy the axioms of choice theory, that is, they are reflexive, transitive, complete, monotonic, convex and continuous—essentially the conditions required for a Hicksian approach to demand theory. Houthakker's wife,

Anna-Teresa Tymieniecka Anna-Teresa Tymieniecka (February 28, 1923 – June 7, 2014) was a Polish philosopher, phenomenologist, founder and president of The World Phenomenology Institute, and editor (from its inception in the late 1960s) of the book series, ''Analecta ...

, was a Polish-born philosopher and founder of the World

Phenomenology Phenomenology may refer to: Art * Phenomenology (architecture), based on the experience of building materials and their sensory properties Philosophy * Phenomenology (philosophy), a branch of philosophy which studies subjective experiences and a ...

Institute; they were married for 52 years, up to his death. Through her he became friendly with

Karol Wojtyła Pope John Paul II ( la, Ioannes Paulus II; it, Giovanni Paolo II; pl, Jan Paweł II; born Karol Józef Wojtyła ; 18 May 19202 April 2005) was the head of the Catholic Church and sovereign of the Vatican City State from 1978 until his ...

, subsequently Pope John Paul II. Barack Obama Sr. (

Barack Obama Barack Hussein Obama II ( ; born August 4, 1961) is an American politician who served as the 44th president of the United States from 2009 to 2017. A member of the Democratic Party (United States), Democratic Party, Obama was the first Af ...

's father) worked as a research assistant for Houthakker over the summer in 1963 at Harvard.

Selected bibliography

References

* * ''Valley News'', 19 April 2003, article and interview with Houthakker.

External links

Home page at Harvard

* {{DEFAULTSORT:Houthakker, Hendrik 1924 births 2008 deaths Dutch economists Dutch Jews 21st-century American economists 20th-century American economists Harvard University faculty Stanford University alumni Dutch emigrants to the United States Jewish American scientists Writers from Amsterdam Members of the United States National Academy of Sciences Fellows of the American Statistical Association Fellows of the Econometric Society Presidents of the Econometric Society Distinguished Fellows of the American Economic Association United States Council of Economic Advisers 20th-century American Jews 21st-century American Jews