Simon Kuznets (1901–1985)
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Who They Were
Simon Kuznets (1901-1985) was a Russian-born American economist known for painstaking statistical research. In the 1930s the US Department of Commerce, acting on a Senate resolution, turned to the National Bureau of Economic Research and to Kuznets to produce estimates of national income; he and a small staff assembled the figures and delivered the report National Income, 1929-32 to the Senate in 1934. That work laid the foundations of modern national income accounting and, ultimately, of GDP. Kuznets spent decades at the NBER and at Pennsylvania, Johns Hopkins and Harvard, and his empirical style, assemble the data first and theorise afterward, shaped how economics was practised in the mid-twentieth century. He received the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences in 1971 for his empirically founded interpretation of economic growth.
Key Contributions
Kuznets built the first US national accounts, creating the statistical machinery that governments and economists still rely on to measure output and growth. Yet he was also among the sharpest early critics of the measure he helped create, attaching to his 1934 report a warning quoted to this day: the welfare of a nation, he wrote, can scarcely be inferred from a measurement of national income. He repeatedly insisted that national income captures market production, not welfare, and questioned whether activities such as defence and financial intermediation belonged in a measure of what a country truly gains. His broader research on the long-run patterns of economic growth across countries and eras earned him the 1971 Nobel Memorial Prize and helped establish the empirical study of growth as a central task of economics.
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Russian-American economist who built the first US national accounts and won the 1971 Nobel for his empirical work on economic growth. Play the games that feature Simon Kuznets: