OpinionTyler Cowen
OpinionTyler Cowen

The Economist Who Defied Expectations

Robert E. Lucas Jr., who died this week, changed the way his profession measures the effects of economic policies.

Robert E. Lucas Jr. in 1995, the year he won the Nobel.

Photographer: Ralf-Finn Hestoft/Corbis/Getty Images

Robert E. Lucas Jr., a Nobel laureate and one of the world’s greatest economists, has died at the age of 85. Perhaps more than any of his peers, he made modern macroeconomic theory both more rigorous and more useful.

The University of Chicago economics department might have faded into normalcy after the retirement of Milton Friedman in 1977. But Lucas, along with Gary Becker, ensured that a distinctive “Chicago school” would reign for decades to come. Lucas pioneered the doctrine of “rational expectations,” an idea that became central to macroeconomics.