Professor, Energy Expert, Dies at 80

Alan S. Manne ’43, a distinguished economist and world-renowned energy expert, died two weeks ago after suffering from cardiac arrest while engaging in one of his favorite pastimes, horseback riding. He was 80 years old.

Manne, who received a Ph.D. in economics from Harvard and lectured at the College immediately following his graduate work, spent much of his professional life at Stanford University, working in the Department of Management Science and Engineering.

After time at Stanford and Yale, he came back to Harvard briefly, from 1974 to 1976, as a professor of political economy at the Kennedy School of Government. He then went back to Stanford and taught until his retirement in 1992.

Although Manne spent most of his professional life at Stanford, his daughter, Elizabeth S. Manne, said, “Harvard was a very big part of his life. His Harvard chair is displayed proudly in his home.”

Manne knew early on what he wanted his profession to be. In the freshman register, he listed his future profession as “economics professor,” according to the secretary for the Class of 1943, Galen L. Stone.

Manne graduated from Harvard as a member of Phi Beta Kappa when he was 18 years old. He then served in the Navy during the last years of World War II. Soon afterward, he worked at the RAND corporation, an Air Force think-tank. There he formed many relationships with his colleagues—including Nobel laureate Harry M. Markowitz—that would last throughout his life.

“Alan was a very intelligent and very productive colleague,” Markowitz said. “I have great respect for him.”

Manne’s modus operandi throughout his professional work was to create long-term, complex economic models. These models relied heavily on linear programming, a subset of mathematics, to determine optimal decision-making in a world of scarce resources. He modeled, for example, how oil shortages would affect both the world as a whole and individual economies 100 years into the future. His models are still used today.

Although his early models were primarily concerned with agriculture, Manne quickly moved his focus to other natural resources, pioneering optimization planning for oil refineries. He is considered to be one of the major experts in the economics of oil.

He also acted as an adviser in India and Mexico. “Alan Manne was among the first to apply the new tools of economic programming to analyze the implications of alternative development strategies available to an economy using quantitative economic models, whose size and sophistication were limited only by the computing capacity then available,” said T.N. Srinivasan, an economics professor at Yale who worked with Manne at the International Institute for Applied System Analysis in Vienna, Austria.

In his later years, Manne created models of the economic cost of global warming and tried to analyze how countries could reduce emissions at the lowest cost.

After his long career at Stanford, Manne retired in 1992, staying on as professor emeritus. Over the course of his career, he published seven books and almost 130 articles, continuing to work until the time of his death.

Although Manne was well-respected for his intellectual accomplishments, friends and colleagues say they regarded him as a generous and well-rounded man.

“He was broadly educated and enjoyed reading history, and he loved classical music, and he loved Impressionist art,” his daughter said. “He spoke languages—and he was still studying languages—and he loved to travel.”

Manne developed a new passion for horseback riding at the age of 65.

A close friend and colleague, Nobel Laureate Kenneth J. Arrow, said Manne also loved to play polo, and that he was a fan of Gilbert and Sullivan operettas.

When Manne could no longer play polo, he continued to ride, focusing instead on jumping. He was riding when he suffered cardiac arrest and fell off his horse.

“It was a beautiful day and he was very happy,” said Jacqueline Manne, his wife of 51 years. “He loved riding his horse...it was one of the great joys of his life.”

His daughter, Elizabeth, said Manne lived a productive and fulfilling life.

“He had just finished reading ‘The Iliad,’ which is something he always wanted to do, just the Thursday before he died,” she said.

Manne is survived by wife Jacqueline and three children: sons Henry and Edward ’78 of Israel and Elizabeth of New York, along with 11 grandchildren and one great-grandchild.