Thomas Crombie Schelling (April 14, 1921 – December 13, 2016) was an American economist and professor of foreign policy, national security, nuclear strategy, and arms control at the School of Public Policy at the University of Maryland, College Park. He was also co-faculty at the New England Complex Systems Institute. Schelling was awarded the 2005 Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences (shared with Robert Aumann) for "having enhanced our understanding of conflict and cooperation through game theory analysis."
Biography
Early years Schelling was born on April 14, 1921, in Oakland, California. He graduated from San Diego High School. He received his bachelor's degree in economics from the University of California, Berkeley, in 1944 and received his PhD in economics from Harvard University in 1951.
Career Schelling served with the Marshall Plan in Europe, the White House, and the Executive Office of the President from 1948 to 1953. He wrote most of his dissertation on national income behavior working at night while in Europe. He left government to join the economics faculty at Yale University. In 1956, "he joined the RAND Corporation as an adjunct fellow, becoming a full-time researcher for a year after leaving Yale, and returning to adjunct status through 2002." In 1958 Schelling was appointed professor of economics at Harvard. That same year, he "co-founded the Center for International Affairs, which was [later] renamed the Weatherhead Center for International Affairs." In 1969, Schelling joined Harvard's John F. Kennedy School of Government, where he was the Lucius N. Littauer Professor of Political Economy. He was among the "founding fathers" of the "modern" Kennedy School, as he helped to shift the curriculum's emphasis away from administration and more toward leadership. Between 1994 and 1999, he conducted research at the International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis (IIASA), in Laxenburg, Austria. In 1990, he left Harvard and joined the University of Maryland School of Public Policy and the University of Maryland Department of Economics. In 1991, he accepted the presidency of the American Economic Association, an organization of which he was also a Distinguished Fellow. In 1995, he accepted the presidency of the Eastern Economic Association. Schelling was a contributing participant of the Copenhagen Consensus.
Personal life and death Schelling was married to Corinne Tigay Saposs from 1947 to 1991, with whom he had four sons. Later in 1991 he married Alice M. Coleman, who brought two sons to the marriage; they became his stepsons. Schelling died on December 13, 2016, in Bethesda, Maryland, from complications following a hip fracture at the age of 95.
Honors and awards In 1977, Schelling received The Frank E. Seidman Distinguished Award in Political Economy. In 1993, he was awarded the Award for Behavior Research Relevant to the Prevention of Nuclear War from the National Academy of Sciences. He received honorary doctorates from Erasmus University Rotterdam in 2003, Yale University in 2009, and RAND Graduate School of Public Analysis, as well as an honorary degree from the University of Manchester in 2010. He was awarded the 2005 Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences, along with Robert Aumann, for "having enhanced our understanding of conflict and cooperation through game-theory analysis." In 2008 he was the Witten Lecturer at the Witten/Herdecke University as the awardee of the Witten Lectures in Economics and Philosophy. Schelling's family auctioned his Nobel award medal, fetching $187,000. They donated this money to the Southern Poverty Law Center, an American 501 nonprofit legal advocacy organization specializing in civil rights and public interest litigation. Alice Schelling said her late husband had credited Smoky the Cowhorse by Will James, the winner of the Newbery Medal in 1927, as the most influential book he had read.
Notable works
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