- Person
- Simon Kuznets
- Lived
- 1901–1985
- Field
- Economics
- From
- Russian-born American
The story
By the end of World War II, Simon Kuznets had built the first reliable national income accounts for the United States. He then turned to a much larger question: how and why do nations grow, and why do some stay poor? He proposed a research programme built on extensive empirical study of four key elements of growth: population increase, the growth of knowledge, how each country adapted to these forces, and economic relations between countries.
As chairman of the Social Science Research Council's Committee on Economic Growth from 1949 to 1968, Kuznets led comparative quantitative analysis of the growth of nations. He collected and analysed statistics on 14 countries in Europe, the United States and Japan over 60 years. Between 1956 and 1967 he published ten long papers on the quantitative aspects of the economic growth of nations in the journal Economic Development and Cultural Change.
His central finding was that a rise in a country's total output requires a profound transformation of its whole economic structure. Production, jobs, the size and age structure of the population, where people lived, trade with other countries and the role of government all change together. Kuznets named the era that began in Europe and spread outward "modern economic growth", the title of his 1966 book Modern Economic Growth: Rate, Structure, and Spread, published by Yale University Press. He followed it in 1971 with Economic Growth of Nations: Total Output and Production Structure.
Kuznets also argued that today's poor countries face conditions different from those that industrialised countries faced before they developed. That insight helped end the simplistic view that all countries pass through the same linear stages, and it launched development economics as a separate field focused on the distinct experience of poorer nations.
The Nobel committee cited this work in 1971, honouring his empirically founded interpretation of economic growth. His habit of asking what actually happened, country by country and decade by decade, remains the starting point for economists who study why some nations prosper.
Why it matters
Kuznets's comparative studies founded the historical, data-driven study of growth that still guides how economists and aid agencies think about helping poorer nations develop.
About Simon Kuznets
Pinsk-born economist who built the first official estimates of US national income, laying the foundations of GDP, and won the 1971 Nobel Prize for his empirical study of economic growth.
More about Simon Kuznets
- Simon Kuznets proposed the famous Kuznets curveIn 1955 Simon Kuznets proposed that as countries develop, income inequality first rises and then falls, an idea known as the Kuznets curve.
- Simon Kuznets discovered the 15–25 year economic swingsStudying US data back to 1865, Simon Kuznets identified economic cycles lasting 15 to 25 years, now known as Kuznets cycles or long swings.
- Simon Kuznets produced the first US national income figuresIn 1934 Simon Kuznets delivered the first official estimate of US national income, laying the groundwork for the measure we now call GDP.
- Simon Kuznets showed savings rates stay stable over timeIn 1942 Simon Kuznets used long-run data to show that the US savings rate stayed roughly constant from the 1870s to the 1940s, overturning a prediction drawn from Keynes.
- Simon Kuznets warned that GDP does not measure welfareSimon Kuznets helped standardise the measurement of national output, but cautioned that a nation's welfare can scarcely be inferred from a measure of national income.
- Simon Kuznets helped nations build economic statisticsAfter World War II, Simon Kuznets advised the governments of China, Japan, India, Korea, Taiwan and Israel on setting up their national systems of economic information.
Sources
- Simon Kuznets Wikipedia
- Simon Kuznets Jewish Virtual Library
- Simon Kuznets, Biographical NobelPrize.org
Another act of tikkun olam. This is part of tikkun olam, the Jewish idea of repairing the world, and every one of us can add to it.