Renewed Economics Professor Stanley Fischer passed away on 31st May, 2025.
"Fischer was born on Oct. 15, 1943, in Mazabuka, a town in Zambia, the nation then known as Northern Rhodesia. His family was part of a close-knit community of Jews who had emigrated to southern Africa. His Latvian-born father, Philip, ran a general store. His mother, Ann, had been born in Cape Town, the daughter of Lithuanian immigrants, according to a Financial Times profile.
At 13, the family moved to Zimbabwe, then called Southern Rhodesia, where Stanley became active in the Habonim, a Zionist youth group, along with Rhoda Keet, his future wife. In the early 1960s, he spent six months on a kibbutz on Israel’s Mediterranean coastal plain, where he combined learning Hebrew with picking and planting bananas.
He was introduced to economics through a course in his senior year in high school and moved to the UK to study at the London School of Economics, earning a bachelor’s degree in 1965 and a master’s in 1966.
He chose MIT for his doctorate work so that he could study under future Nobel laureate economists Paul Samuelson and Robert Solow. He said he may have been drawn to macroeconomics “because I was interested in big questions.”
“I had this image of the world as we knew it having nearly collapsed in the 1930s, and that these guys” — the macroeconomists — “had saved it,” he said in a 2005 interview with Blanchard."
The following are some of the finest pieces on Prof Sten's life and works across the world:
