William Alonso, American Population studies educator, demographer. unites states department Committee on Economics Development Administration grantee Institute Urban and Regional Development, University of California-Berkeley, since 1967; grantee National Science Foundation, since 1970. Member Regional Science Association (Vice-President 1969).
Background
He was born in Buenos Aires but moved to the United States in 1946 during the Perón regime with his father Amado Alonso, a leading Spanish philologist, who was then appointed at Harvard. He obtained and began his career with a bachelor's degree in architectural science from Harvard in 1954.
Education
Bachelor of Science in Physics, Virginia Military Institute, 1955;postgraduate, Carnegie Institute Technology, 1955-1956;Master of Science, Doctor of Philosophy in Physics, Oregon State University, 1963.
Career
He also received a master's degree in city planning from Harvard University's Graduate School of Public Administration in 1956. In 1960 he received a doctorate in regional science from the University of Pennsylvania. From 1960 to 1961 Alonso worked as director and professor in the Department of Regional and Urban Planning at the Bandung Institute of Technology in Indonesia.
He then served as a visiting professor at the Universidad Central de Venezuela in 1962 before coming to Harvard as the acting director of the Center of Urban Studies from 1963 to 1965. Alonso also worked at Yale University, the University of California at Berkeley, and Stanford University. In 1976 Alonso became Director of the Center for Population Studies of Harvard University.
His research was focused on demographic changes, in particular in very strongly urbanized areas. He thus developed a mathematical model, connecting migration and the evolution of the distribution of the population. In 1964, he published Location and land use, in which he defined a modelled approach on the formation of land rent in urban environments.
His model would become one of the pillars of urban economics as from the seventies.
Achievements
Views
An interest in the spatial order of societies has characterised much of my work. My Location and Land Use, a re warmed doctoral dissertation, used microeconomics to build a model of land markets and urban form and was written in what then passed for mathematical economics. The book was well received, stayed in print for twenty years and became a standard footnote in some areas of urban economics.
But just how different economics was a generation ago is illustrated by a delay of several years in the book’s publication: Harvard University Press understandably hesitated to publish because it received quite negative commentsfrom many referees, eminent land economists who as institutionalists were offended by what seemed to them a bloodless and mechanical approach.
Since then the bulk of my work, both as an academic and a policy adviser, has been on urban and regional development and policy, both in poor and in rich countries. Such issues are in part economic, to be sure, but to deal with them one must consider institutions, politics, historical and social factors, and I have tried to do this without worrying about disciplinary boundaries. Imperfect knowledge is intrinsic to these messy issues, and this has made me curious about conceptualisation, categorisation and measurement in their social context.
This aspect of my work is illustrated by an early article (see No. 3 above) and by a forthcoming book (The Politics of Numbers).
While these concerns have led me away from the stern standards of microeconomic fundamentalism, I retain a love for the crystalline beauty of formal models. Indeed, in spite of my limited mathematics (recently characterised as ‘Mickey Mouse’ by a student), I am working with pleased excitement on a generalising statement about the form underlying ‘from-to’ accounting, or transition models, as used in several disciplines.
I have only published one paper (see No. 9 above) on this, but I have learned a great deal since then and in the coming years hope to provide an intellectual scheme that unifies gravity models, input-output tables, log-linear contingency tables and other such. The value of this work, if any, is not to recommend any particular model in this vast family, but to clarify the commonalities and differences of their structure.
This may help in certain cases in the choice, design, calibration and use of models of this type.
Membership
Member Regional Science Association (vice president 1969).
Connections
Married Rosemary Ann Scott, August 18, 1962. Children: William Scott, Christopher Lamar.
Unites states department Committee on Economics Development Administration grantee Institute Urban and Regional Development, University of California-Berkeley, since 1967. Grantee National Science Foundation, since 1970.
Unites states department Committee on Economics Development Administration grantee Institute Urban and Regional Development, University of California-Berkeley, since 1967. Grantee National Science Foundation, since 1970.