Hear author talk about his prize-winning economist dad

Hear about a really smart man whose son has written a book about him: “Leonid Hurwicz: Intelligent Designer: How War and the Great Depression Inspired a Nobel Economist.” Michael Hurwicz will read at the Skagit Unitarian Universalist Fellowship Sunday, May 12 at 2 p.m.

The elder Hurwicz journeyed as a Polish Jew from 1930s Warsaw to America in 1940 at age 23.

As an economist and statistician, he realized “there are two kinds of games in economics. One is the game where people use only legal moves. Then there is the true game, the one like real life, where the strategies and moves people make, some of them contain illegal gains. So you take into account when you write the rules of the game that the players will try to cheat.”

That’s the basis of “mechanism design,” for which the 90-year old won the 2007 Memorial Prize in economics.

Hurwicz will also tell stories about his father and sing songs.

At the 10:30 a.m. service at the Fellowship, Sharon Abreu, Hurwicz’s wife, will present a service about John Kennedy’s Peace Speech, from 1963 and its relevance for today. They will provide music also.

Abreu is a member of the JFK Peace Speech Committee online group.

The couple live on Orcas Island.

Skagit Unitarian Universalist Fellowship is at 500 West Section Street, Mount Vernon, behind the post office.

Information: skagituuf.com, 360-419-9014.