MOROCCO IS ACCELERATING! feature - Alstom

PARADOX
Maurice Allais,
Economist, Nobel Prize 1988.THE ALLAIS
Biography
Maurice Allais had accepted to participate in this issue of AT Magazine.
Very sadly, he died on 9 October 2010 while this project remained unfi nished.
We are nevertheless offering you the opportunity to read the few lines
that he had begun to prepare. It had been agreed that he would evoke for
us the famous allegory of the Calais Passenger, known as the Allais Paradox.
We invite you to discover this innovative idea on pricing at marginal cost
compared with pricing at average cost. The application of these ideas
to the transport or energy sectors mobilised in the post war period a group of
economists and industrialists which included Maurice Allais, Marcel Boiteux,
the future President of EDF, and Gabriel Dessus, Sales Director at EDF.
French economist, born in Paris
on 31 May 1911, died
in Saint-Cloud on 9 October 2010.
Engineer service des Mines
de Nantes from 1937 to 1943.
Director Bureau du documentation
et de statistique minière from 1943
to 1948.
Director of Research
CNRS from 1946 until his
retirement in 1980.
In 1944, he was appointed
Professor of Economics
at the École nationale
des Mines de Paris, a position
which he occupied until 1988.
Director Centre d’analyse
économique from 1946.
Director Economic and Social
Research Group (1944-1970).
Professor of Economic Theory
at the Institut de statistiques
de l’Université de Paris
(1947-1968).
1958-1959: Distinguished
Visiting Scholar at
the Thomas Jefferson Centre
at the University of Virginia.
Professor at the Institut
des hautes études
internationales de Genève
(1967-1970). From 1970 until
1985, he ran the Monetary
Analysis Seminar at
the Université de Paris-X.
Maurice Allais retired in 1980
with the title of Ingénieur
général honoraire au
Corps national des Mines.
“I believe I know quite a lot about transport
as I was responsible, in 1936, at the age
of 25, for checking the accounts of
establishments fi nanced by the State.
I was an engineer working in the service
ordinaire des Mines in Nantes, and
my task in particular included controlling
the accounts of the Compagnie
des chemins de fer de l’Ouest* and those
and formulating proposals. Theory shows
us that for a given distribution of income,
optimum management of the economy,
that is to say maximisation of the social
yield, is attained when each product
or service is sold at its marginal cost,
in other words at a price equal to what
its production actually costs.”
One of the simplest and most accessible
of tramways. After the war, I continued expressions of this work is the Allais
working on this subject Paradox or the Paradox of the Calais �
* The SNCF was not created until January 1938, through the merger of several rail companies, severely weakened by the effects
of the economic crisis of 1929 and by the growing competition from road transport. The Chemins de fer de l’Ouest had been bought
by the State as early as 1909, because of their loss-making situation.
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