Each person is unique, but some are more unique than others. Anyone that met with Karl-Gustaf Löfgren, an eminent and very influential Swedish economist, will be able to testify that this assertion is true. Born and raised at the small coastal town Holmsund (an hours flight north of Stockholm), he became attached to academic life via the Universities of Umeå (SLU and University of Umeå) some 20 km away, in the end of the 1960s. He defended his Ph.D. in economics in 1977, became full professor in Forest Economics at SLU-Umeå 1979 and full professor of Economics at Umeå University 1989. He held visiting professor positions at a handful of prestigious universities, but stayed in Holmsund and served both universities in Umeå in many different positions.
Throughout a productive career, he produced influential works in many different areas of economics. In some ways, his academic contributions are Samuelsonesque; his outputs changed both micro- and macro-economics, as well as Swedish policy. Not to mention the history of economics. For example, he read the Faustmann classic on the optimal forest rotation in original German from 1848 (try it!) and produced a paper that tied together the Faustmann- Ohlin-Pressler theories about forest economics in a remarkable paper. With similar ease, he extended disequilibrium macroeconomics, explored how different concepts of uncertainty in dynamic optimization relates to the classical theory of investment, estimated the effect of labor market policies, shaped the future of Swedish Forest policy, extended the Slutsky equation, explained how to integrate biotechnological progress in natural resource modeling, contributed to welfare economics related to health economics, showed how to estimate the effects of cyclical dumping and much, much more. It is difficult to find a Swedish economist that have contributed to so many areas of economics, while simultaneously being involved in senior policy advice functions. He was a long time member of the Committee that selects the Nobel prize in economics (The “Sveriges Riksbank’s Prize in Economics”, awarded since 1969). Somewhat mischievously, we tried every year to get some first-hand information about the eventual winner. This is a major faux pas, of course, but he knew that we knew, so we could all laugh about it. He avoided all our traps, but was visibly proud when, to many economists’ surprise, Elinor Ostrom was declared the winner in 2009.
