ONE of Scotland’s greatest minds, Nobel Prize-winning economist Sir James Mirrlees, has died at his Cambridge home aged 82.
Joint winner of the Nobel Prize for Economics in 1996, Mirrlees was a long-standing member of the Scottish Government’s council of economic advisers, and did a great deal of work for the council ahead of the 2014 independence referendum.
His widow Lady Patricia Mirrlees told The National: “It is hard to put into words the immense sense of loss. Jim was brilliant and yet he was modest and lived simply. He gave generously of his time and knowledge as a teacher and supervisor in Oxford and Cambridge and as the Master of Morningside College. He was deeply loved and respected and will be sorely missed.
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“His great life is over, but Jim will live on through his work and those he inspired.”
Former first minister Alex Salmond was among the first to pay tribute to Mirrlees, who was born in Minnigaff in Dumfries and Galloway in 1936 and was educated at Edinburgh University.
Salmond said: “Jim Mirrlees was both a Nobel laureate and a thoroughly nice man. For no fee, this internationally-renowned economist served on the council of economic advisers and made a massive contribution to its work.
“My thoughts go out to Patricia who I first met when she was handing out some badly needed sustenance to a group of anti-war protestors outside the House of Commons at the time of the Iraq war – her courage will stand her in good stead at this time.”
Mirrlees had a long relationship with Nuffield College in Oxford which he joined as a professorial fellow in 1968. He was the Edgeworth professor of economics until 1995 when he left Oxford to take up the professorship of political economy at Trinity College, Cambridge.
In 2002, he became distinguished professor-at-large of the Chinese University of Hong Kong, and in 2009 the master of Morningside College in that university.
The late Sir Tony Atkinson of Nuffield once described Mirrlees as one of the best economists in the world, remarking that he was best known for his work on the theory of the optimal design of income taxation.
He wrote: “In 1969 [Jim] reformulated the question in a way which had never been done before and developed a deep set of mathematical tools to solve the problem.
“He took this an important stage further when he recognised in the mid-1970s that the mathematical structure of the problem applied much more generally to questions of mechanism design in the face of incomplete information. In this way he has influenced whole branches of economics.”
Mirrlees shared with William Vickrey the 1996 Nobel Prize for Economics in recognition of their research into the economic theory of incentives under asymmetric information. He served as president of the Econometric Society and of the Royal Economic Society, and was elected a fellow of the British Academy and an honorary fellow of the Royal Society of Edinburgh.
Mirrlees is also survived by his daughters Catriona and Fiona, from his marriage to Gill, who passed away in 1993. His funeral is on Friday, September 14, at 10.30 am.
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