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I'm a bit surprised that no one has commented on Sam 
Bostaph's story concerning Buchanan's view of Allais's 
Nobel prize- that Allais "...hadn't done anything in  
twenty years."  In fact, Allais published a great deal of 
economic work in the years between 1968 and 1988.  To 
mention only the most important - a 700+ page work on 
The General Theory of Surpluses in 1978 (see Allais's 
account of this work in the New Palgrave's) - numerous 
works on the quantity theory of money and on the rate 
of interest from 1968 to 1985, and even much new work 
on the expected utility hypothesis, the "Allais paradox" 
etc.  On the other hand, Allais's work, aside from his 
"paradox," seems to have had remarkably little influence 
on American economists.  Buchanan would have been closer 
to the truth had he said that the prize was awarded to a  
man who might as well have done nothing in 20 years. 
 
The lack of interest in Allais's work puzzles me.  I  
vividly remember Allais giving a seminar to a packed 
house at the U. of Chicago on his theory of the demand 
for money in the early 1960's.  The talk had a lot us 
puzzled, but the claims for its empirical power were 
impressive and exciting. Milton Friedman, in his usual 
pellucid fashion, explained Allais's theory in terms 
more familar to most of the audience.  Friedman seemed 
sympathetic to the theory and didn't argue (that night) 
with Allais's claims that his theory yielded better 
predictions than the various Chicago quantity equations, 
despite its requiring fewer estimated parameters.  Yet 
there was little follow-up that I know of and Friedman's 
article on the quantity theory in the New Palgrave doesn't 
even cite Allais's work. In his general theory of surpluses, 
he claims to prove the three fundamental theorems of welfare 
economics even if production sets exhibit increasing returns 
to scale! These are very important claims made by a Nobel 
prize winner, yet I know of no substatial American work 
evaluating them.  I'd be grateful if anyone could explain 
this neglect or point me toward literature where Allais's work 
is evaluated. 
 
Finally, in contrast to Debreu, Allais is very much concerned 
with the "real world."  Not only has he worked on many 
"mundane" practical problems, e.g., a book on pricing policy 
for the state-owned coal mines, but in his Nobel lecture he 
said that an economic model and the theory it represents must 
be accepted or rejected on the basis of its correspondance 
with empirical observations.  Further, "When neither the 
hypotheses nor the implications of a theory can be 
confronted with the real world, that theory is devoid of 
any scientfiic interest."  He has been very critical of much 
recent mathematical theorizing that seems unrelated to real 
world phenomena. 
 
Mike Lynch 
 
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