Armen Alchian

Armen Albert Alchian (born April 12, 1914) is an American economist and an emeritus professor of economics at the University of California, Los Angeles. Alchian was born in Fresno, California into an Armenian family. He attended California State University, Fresno for two years before transferring to Stanford University in 1934, which awarded him the B.A. (1936) and Ph.D. (1944). He was a statistician with the USA Army Air Corps, from 1942 to 1946. In 1946, he joined the Economics Department at UCLA, where he spent the rest of his career. For many years, he was affiliated with the Rand Corporation. Alchian was elected a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 1978. In 1996, he became a Distinguished Fellow of the American...