Family and early years of silver miners and goldsmiths Ragnar Frisch was born on 3 March 1895 in
Christiania as the son of
gold- and
silversmith Anton Frisch and Ragna Fredrikke Frisch (née Kittilsen). The
Frisch family had emigrated from Germany to
Kongsberg in Norway in the 17th century and his ancestors had worked for the
Kongsberg Silver Mines for generations; Ragnar's grandfather Antonius Frisch had become a goldsmith in Christiania in 1856. His family had thus worked with precious metals like silver and gold for at least 300 years. Being expected to continue his family business, Frisch became an
apprentice in the David Andersen workshop in Oslo. However at his mother's advice, while doing his apprenticeship Frisch also started studying at the
Royal Frederick University. His chosen topic was economics, as it seemed to be "the shortest and easiest study" available at the university, He published a few papers about
probability theory, started teaching at the University of Oslo during 1925 and, in 1926, he obtained the Dr. Philos. degree with a thesis in
mathematical statistics. Also in 1926, Frisch published an article outlining his view that economics should follow the same path towards theoretical and empirical quantization that other sciences, especially physics, had followed. During the same year, he published his seminal article "Sur un problème d'économie pure" starting the implementation of his own quantization programme. The article offered theoretical axiomatizations which result in a precise specification of both
ordinal and
cardinal utility, followed by an empirical estimation of the cardinal specification. Frisch also started lecturing a course on
production theory, introducing a mathematization of the subject. Frisch received a fellowship from the
Rockefeller Foundation to visit the
United States in 1927. There, seeking other economists interested in the new mathematical and statistical approaches to economics, he associated with
Irving Fisher,
Wesley Clair Mitchell,
Allyn Young and
Henry Schultz. He wrote a paper analyzing the role of
investment in explaining
economic fluctuations. Wesley Mitchell, who had just written a book on
business cycles, popularized Frisch's paper which was introducing new advanced methods. followed in the same year by "Statics and dynamics in economic theory", which introduced dynamics in economic analysis. Frisch became a full Professor at the university in 1931. He also founded at the university the Rockefeller-funded Institute of Economics in 1932 and became its Director of Research. Ragnar Frisch received the Antonio Feltrinelli prize from the
Accademia Nazionale dei Lincei in 1961 and the
Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences in 1969 (awarded jointly with
Jan Tinbergen) for "having developed and applied dynamic models for the analysis of economic processes". He was a member of both the
American Academy of Arts and Sciences and the
American Philosophical Society. During the
occupation of Norway by Nazi Germany, Frisch was arrested, along with 13 other University of Oslo faculty members and more than 100 students, in October 1943. He was imprisoned in
Bredtveit concentration camp from 17 October 1943, then in
Berg concentration camp from 22 November 1943, then in
Grini detention camp from 9 December 1943 to 8 October 1944.
Family Frisch married Marie Smedal in 1920 and they had a daughter, Ragna (b. 1938). His granddaughter,
Nadia Hasnaoui (Ragna's child), became a Norwegian television performer. After his first wife died in 1952, he remarried in 1953 with childhood friend Astrid Johannessen. who died in 1980. ==Work==