Author: By William C. Mann Associated Press

Date: Thursday, October 16, 1980
Page: ?????
Section: RUN OF PAPER

The 60-year-old University of Pennsylvania professor won the Memorial Prize in Economics and became the eighth American citizen to win a nobel prize among the 11 laureates this year. He was selected for his creation of econometric models used in analyzing economic fluctuations and policies. Econometrics is the use of mathematics and statistics to verify and develop economic theories.

The Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences, which chooses the winner in economics, said that for 30 years Klein has been the leading researcher in the field of analysis of business fluctuations.

Klein, an economics professor in Pennsylvania since 1958, served as an adviser to Jimmy Carter during the 1976 presidential campaign and is an unofficial consultant to the Administration. He declined an official post to avoid raising the issue of his affiliation years ago with the American Communist Party, sources said. They said he also wanted to continue his research.

The native of Omaha, Neb., was a Communist Party member in 1946 and 1947, while doing research at the University of Chicago. He left the United States for Britain during the 1950s, when Sen. Joseph R. McCarthy's congressional committee was investigating the alleged communist connections of some prominent Americans.

The economics prize, provided by the Swedish Central Bank, was added in 1968 to the original five established in the will of Alfred Nobel to honor humanitarian works. Nobel invented dynamite.

The bank matches the other prizes' stipends, which this year are $212,000 each, a record in the 79-year-old Nobel series.

Klein's graduate students stood and applauded yesterday when he entered the classroom. The laureate broke into a broad smile and said, "You make me feel like a politician."

When asked about the prize money, he responded, "It's not a big thing." He said what mattered to him was the recognition.

He said an econometric model was "a good tool for dealing with the uncertainties of life."

The other US citizens who won Nobel Prizes this year are Polish-born author and poet Czeslaw Milosz, who works at the University of California at Berkeley, in literature; George Snell of the Jackson Laboratory in Bar Harbor, Maine, and Venezuelan-born Baruj Benacerraf of Harvard, who shared the prize in medicine with Frenchman Jean Dausset; James Cronin of the University of Chicago and Val L. Fitch of Princeton University, in physics; and Walter Gilbert of Harvard and Paul Berg of Stanford, who shared the chemistry prize with Briton Frederick Sanger of Cambridge University.

The Norwegian Nobel Committee awarded the peace prize to Argentine human rights activist Adolfo Perez Esquivel.

Ragnar Bentzel, a Swedish economist who sits on the economics selection committee, said Klein's current project, called "Link," is his "crowning achievement."

The project, begun in the late 1960s, aims to coordinate econometric models of various countries to help forecast international trade and capital movements, the academy said. The model is used to show such things as how an increase in oil prices influences inflation, employment and trade balances.

In the early 1960s, Klein led an extensive project affiliated with the Brookings Institute, a liberal Washington think tank, "to construct a detailed econometric model and to use it for forecasting the short-term development of the American economy," the academy said.

A subsequent work, the "Wharton Econometric Forecasting Model," named after the University of Pennsylvania's business school, has become a standard tool for economic forecasters.

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