Daniel Kahneman — econ (nobel) with roots in the Russian Empire
Daniel Kahneman was born in Tel Aviv, then in Mandatory Palestine, on 5 March 1934, while his mother, Rachel, née Shenzon, was visiting her family there; the family's home was in Paris. In his Nobel autobiography he described his parents as Lithuanian Jews who had emigrated to France in the early 1920s and done well; his father, Efrayim, was chief of research at a large chemical factory. The parents' own birth years are not recorded, but they belonged to a family rooted in the Kovno Governorate of the Russian Empire: his father's brother, Rabbi Yosef Shlomo Kahaneman, born in 1886 in the small town of Kuliai, became rabbi of Ponevezh and later re-established the Ponevezh Yeshiva in Bnei Brak.
The family was in Paris when the Germans occupied it in 1940. His father was interned for six weeks after the first large round-up of Jews and released through the intervention of his employer, Eugène Schueller; the family then spent the rest of the war in hiding, and his father died in 1944. In 1948 Kahneman, his mother and his sister moved to Palestine.
He studied psychology and mathematics at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, was drafted in 1954 and, after a year as an infantry officer, served in the psychology branch of the Israel Defense Forces, where he designed an interview system for assessing recruits, and took his doctorate at the University of California, Berkeley, in 1961. Returning to the Hebrew University, he began in 1969 a long collaboration with Amos Tversky; their first joint paper appeared in 1971. Their papers on judgment under uncertainty and on heuristics and biases, and their prospect theory of 1979, showed how people's decisions systematically depart from the rational model assumed in economics.
He later taught at the University of British Columbia and Berkeley and from 1993 at Princeton. In 2002, after Tversky's death, he shared the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences with Vernon Smith, despite never having taken a course in economics. His book Thinking, Fast and Slow (2011) brought the work to a wide public, and he received the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 2013.
He died on 27 March 2024, aged ninety.
"Parents emigrated from Vilna, Lithuania (Russian Empire) to Mandatory Palestine in the 1920s–30s."
Migration storyTracing the roots — Lithuania, then in the Russian Empire (both parents); father's family from Kovno Governorate
His parents were Lithuanian Jews who emigrated to France in the early 1920s. His father's brother, Rabbi Yosef Shlomo Kahaneman, head of the Ponevezh Yeshiva, was born in 1886 in Kuliai, in the Kovno Governorate of the Russian Empire.
The father of Behavioral Economics.
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Lithuania, then in the Russian Empire (both parents); father's family from Kovno Governorate. At the time, this region lay within the Russian Empire, which spanned from Poland to the Pacific.