A summit with the lau
Economics alum addresses i When the Nobel Prize committee wrote to ask economist Dr. Gary Hoover to speak at its first-ever summit in April, he deleted the email. “I thought it was a joke. I thought, no Nobel Prize people are going to be contacting me,” he laughed. “I’m just waiting for them to ask me for my credit card because I’m convinced this is a scam.” But his colleagues thought it might be real. They urged Hoover to follow up. So, he sent a message back, requesting proof. If this was really the Nobel Prize committee, he said, surely the members could get a former winner of the Nobel Prize in Economics to confirm it, since there was one listed on the preliminary program. “A couple of days later, the laureate sends me an email and says, ‘This is real,’” Hoover said. Even so, he was still skeptical – “Email addresses can be faked,” he defended – until a colleague who actually sat on the Nobel Prize committee reassured him. “‘The Nobel Prize doesn’t make mistakes. If they contacted you, that means they want you,’” Hoover recalled. And so, UWM alum Gary Hoover was added to the Nobel Prize summit speaker lineup, joining a list of distinguished individuals from around the globe – names like former Vice President Al Gore, Dr. Anthony Fauci, and Nobel Prize winner the Dalai Lama. The Nobel Prize Summit The Nobel Prize committee, famously known for selecting Nobel laureates to recognize outstanding achievements in science, literature and other fields, hosted its firstever summit in April in partnership with the National Academies of Science, Engineering, and Medicine. Titled, “Our Planet, Our Future,” the virtual event brought together Nobel laureates, leading scientists and researchers, policymakers, business leaders, and others to answer the question, “What can be achieved in this decade to put the world on a path to a more sustainable, more prosperous future for all of humanity?” While the summit placed a heavy emphasis on climate change, Hoover was there to address another avenue of sustainability: Income inequality.
4 • IN FOCUS • June, 2021
Dr. Gary hoover, an economist at Tulane University and a UW-Milwaukee alumnus, delivered a presentatio
Hoover is a leading expert on that particular subject. He is a professor of economics at Tulane University and the executive director of the university’s Murphy Institute. His work focuses on how economic policy affects income distribution, both vertically, between different socioeconomic classes, and horizontally, across different demographics within the same socioeconomic class. His talk for the Nobel Prize summit focused on the gap
between rich and poor. In a healthy economy, education is usually a means for increasing income and moving up in socioeconomic class. However, when that promise of economic mobility is violated – Hoover pointed to 2011 Egypt when people with Master’s degrees could find no jobs beyond driving taxis as an example – then the economy suffers and unrest begins to build. “Having (an income) gap isn’t a bad thing, but having no bridge is bad. You have to have a bridge,” Hoover added in an interview after the summit. “If people can’t (move
