John Nash: warmth in a long divorce, now sadness in a final separation

It’s not hard to believe – particularly if like me you’ve had the personal experience – that a marriage lasting over thirty years can be highly enriching. But what about a 38-year divorce? It’s a little surprising that it too can be the basis of a deep, caring relationship. To say nothing of a rebirth of intellectual endeavour.

John Forbes Nash, who died with his wife Alicia on 23 May 2015, married her in 1957. At that time, he had already done the work on games theory which won him his PhD then, and a shared Nobel Prize in Economics forty years later.

In 1959, he was diagnosed as paranoid schizophrenic. The strain of coping with his condition led to the breakdown of their marriage, and in 1963 John and Alicia divorced.

He was repeatedly hospitalised, always, he claimed, against his will, between then and 1970. He disliked psychiatric treatment and, in particular, anti-psychotic drugs. Instead, he preferred to draw on his internal forces and train himself to avoid certain delusional lines of thinking. Once he’d learned to recognise them, he felt he could push them aside and focus on rational ideas, which meant being able to return to mathematical research. He explained in 1994:

…gradually I began to intellectually reject some of the delusionally influenced lines of thinking which had been characteristic of my orientation. This began, most recognisably, with the rejection of politically oriented thinking as essentially a hopeless waste of intellectual effort. So at the present time I seem to be thinking rationally again in the style that is characteristic of scientists.

Despite their divorce, Alicia continued to be involved in his care. On his discharge from hospital, he moved back into her home, as a boarder. So she worked with him on the long fight against his delusions. She was at his side when he took his Nobel prize, as shown in the film made of his life, A beautiful mind, from the biography by journalist Sylvia Nasar. In 2001, Alicia and he remarried – 38 years after their divorce.

John and Alicia Nash in 2002

By that time, he’d long since been allowed to return to his research at Princeton and later to teaching. It was fitting that he won another prestigious prize at the end of his life: the Abel prize, viewed by many as the Nobel prize for Mathematics, since there is no actual Nobel in the field. He shared it with fellow mathematician Luis Nierenberg, for work on partial differential equations (please don’t expect me to explain them – I’d have to try to understand them first).

He was 86, his wife of six then twelve years, was 82. They had travelled to Norway to collect the prize together just last week, on 19 May. They were in the back of a taxi returning from Newark airport from that trip when the driver lost control, and they were both thrown out and killed.

At least they went out on a high, and quickly. And yet it seems a terrible waste of so much brilliance – and of so much warmth. Russell Crowe, who played Nash in the film, tweeted that they were “beautiful minds, beautiful hearts.”

A tribute to just how supportive, and fruitful, a 38-year divorce can be between two exceptional people.

The man who saw through the fund managers: a well-deserved Nobel prize.

Delighted to see that Eugene Fama is one of the three economists just honoured with a Nobel Prize. 

Fama: Nobel Laureate who saw through the trick

I’ve had a soft spot for him for ages. He’s the one who dug into all those claims of fund managers to be such a great asset for your savings. You know, the ones who say ‘entrust us with your money and watch it grow, grow, grow under our inspired and expert nurturing.’

What did Fama find? On average, the growth of managed funds over any reasonably extended period – say twenty years or so – is statistically indistinguishable from the growth of a bunch of shares bought at random on the stock market and kept for the same period.

Isn’t that a great finding? Overall, those super clever traders and dealers add absolutely no value above the average behaviour of the stock market: some may get a better return, but for each of those, there’s one who under-performs. Taken as a whole, their expertise contributes nothing to getting funds to grow better than they would on their own.

Savour that irony for a few moments. Smile at it. For now.

Because the next piece of the jigsaw’s less funny. All these clever guys charge a fee. So the performance of managed funds, from the point of view of the client, is actually less good than the random behaviour of the stock market.

Of course, like most people, I’m far too lazy to go out and buy my own shares. My pension is dependent on funds managed by some of these characters. So I contribute to keeping them in the lifestyle to which they’ve grown accustomed.

Which is a great lifestyle. Those fees generate some mouth-watering salaries. Funded by the general indolence of the many like me who prefer to depend on them, rather than on ourselves.

Fine work, if you can get into it. Which takes ingenuity. But then I did say they were clever.

All of which makes me deeply grateful to Eugene Fama for having cut through all the tinsel glamour that surrounds that profession. And delighted that the Nobel prize committee shares my esteem for him.