Simon Kuznets

Simon Smith Kuznets (Семён Абра́мович Кузне́ц; April 30, 1901 – July 8, 1985) was an Russian-born American economist and statistician who received the 1971 Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences "for his empirically founded interpretation of economic growth which has led to new and deepened insight into the economic and social structure and process of development."

Kuznets made a decisive contribution to the transformation of economics into an empirical science and to the formation of quantitative economic history.

Simon Kuznets was born in 1901 in Pinsk, Russian Empire, in modern Belarus, to a Lithuanian-Jewish family.

He completed his schooling, first at the Rivne, then, Kharkiv Realschule of Ukraine.

In 1918, Kuznets entered the Kharkiv Institute of Commerce where he studied economic sciences, statistics, history and mathematics under the guidance of professors P. Fomin (political economy), A. Antsiferov (statistics), V. Levitsky (economic history and economic thought), S. Bernstein (probability theory), V. Davats (mathematics), and others.

Basic academic courses at the Institute helped him to acquire "exceptional" erudition in economics, as well as in history, demography, statistics and natural sciences.

According to the institute's curriculum, development of national economies had to be analyzed in the wider context of changes in "connected spheres" and with the involvement of proper methods and empirical data.

There, he began to study economics, and became exposed to Joseph Schumpeter's theory of innovation and the business cycle.

At the turn of the decade, the normal work in the institute was interrupted by the events of the Civil War; reorganizations were undertaken by the Soviet authorities in the sphere of the higher education.

There is no precise information whether Kuznets continued his studies at the institute, but it is known that he joined the Department of Labor of UZHBURO (South Bureau) of the Central Council of Trade Unions.

There, he published his first scientific paper, "Monetary wages and salaries of factory workers in Kharkov in 1920"; he explored the dynamics of different types of wages by industries in Kharkov and income differentiation, depending on the wage system.

In 1922, the Kuznets family emigrated to the United States.

Kuznets then studied at Columbia University under the guidance of Wesley Clair Mitchell.

He graduated with a B.S. in 1923, M.A. in 1924, and Ph.D. in 1926.

As his magister thesis, he defended his essay "Economic system of Dr. Schumpeter, presented and analyzed", written in Kharkiv.

From 1925 to 1926, Kuznets spent time studying economic patterns in prices as the Research Fellow at the Social Science Research Council.

In 1927, he became a member of the research staff of the National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER), where he worked until 1961.

It was this work that led to his book "Secular Movements in Production and Prices", defended as a doctoral thesis and published in 1930.

From 1931 until 1936, Kuznets was a part-time professor at the University of Pennsylvania.

From 1931 to 1934, at Mitchell's behest, Kuznets took charge of the NBER's work on U.S. national income accounts, giving the first official estimation of the US national income.

In 1936, Kuznets took the lead in establishing the Conference on Research, Income and Wealth, which brought together government officials and academic economists, engaged in the development of the U.S. national income and product accounts, and in 1947 helped to establish its international counterpart, the International Association for Research in Income and Wealth.

In 1937 he was elected as a fellow of the American Statistical Association.

He was elected to the Pi Gamma Mu social science honor society chapter at the University of Pennsylvania and actively served as a chapter officer in the 1940s; becoming a full-time professor from 1936 until 1954.

During the Second World War, between 1942 and 1944, Kuznets became the associate director of the Bureau of Planning and Statistics of the War Production Board.

He took part in work to assess the country's capacity to expand military production.

Researchers used national income accounting, together with a rough form of linear programming, to measure the potential for increased production and the resources from which it would come, and to identify the materials that were binding constraints on expansion.

After the war, he worked as an advisor for the governments of China, Japan, India, Korea, Taiwan, and Israel in the establishment of their national systems of economic information.

Kuznets cooperated with the Growth Center of Yale University, the Social Science Research Council (SSRC).

He guided extensive research, holding a number of positions in research institutions, such as the Chairman of the Falk Project for Economic Research in Israel, 1953–1963; member of the board of trustees and honorary chairman, Maurice Falk Institute for Economic Research in Israel, from 1963; and chairman, Social Science Research Council Committee on the Economy of China, 1961–1970.

In 1954, Kuznets moved to Johns Hopkins University, where he was professor of political economy until 1960.

Kuznets was elected as the President of the American Economic Association (1954), President of the American Statistical Association (1949), an honorable member of the Association of Economic History, the Royal Statistical Society of England and a member of the Econometric Society, the International Statistical Institute, the American Philosophical Society, the Royal Swedish Academy and a corresponding member of the British Academy.

From 1961 until his retirement in 1970, Kuznets taught at Harvard.

Apart from that, Kuznets collaborated with a number of research organizations and government agencies.

He was awarded the Medal of Francis Walker (1977).

Simon Kuznets died on July 8, 1985, at the age of 84.

In 2013 The Kharkiv National University of Economics, where he studied in 1918–1921 was named after him; Simon Kuznets Kharkiv National University of Economics.

His name is associated with the formation of modern economic science as an empirical discipline, the development of statistical methods of research and the emergence of quantitative economic history.

Kuznets is credited with revolutionising econometrics, and this work is credited with fueling the so-called Keynesian revolution.

Kuznets' views and scientific methodology were highly influenced by methodological settings received by him in Kharkiv and fully shared by Mitchell for the statistical, inductive construction of hypotheses in economics and its empirical testing.

Kuznets treated a priori and speculative conceptions with deep skepticism.