Background
GROSSMAN, Gregory was born in 1921 in Kiev, Union of the Soviet Socialist Republics.
GROSSMAN, Gregory was born in 1921 in Kiev, Union of the Soviet Socialist Republics.
Bachelor of Science (Commerce), Master of Arts University California Berkeley, 1941, 1943. Doctor of Philosophy Harvard University, 1953.
He is credited with the introduction of the terms "second economy" and "command economy". He received his undergraduate degree in economics from Berkeley in 1942 and his Doctor of Philosophy in economics from Harvard University in 1952. He spent his entire career, 1952-1993, at Berkeley.
The term "command economy" was introduced in his seminal 1963 article Notes for a Theory of the Command Economy.
The term "second economy" was introduced in his another article, The Second Economy of the Union of the Soviet Socialist Republics (1977).
( This study inquires into the reliability and general us...)
lieutenant was by
happenstance that I came to a life-long career of study and teaching of the Soviet and Soviet-type economies. Grown up in the interwar years in a Russian-speaking milieu (outside the Union of the Soviet Socialist Republics, thank God), I had as an undergraduate the good fortune of meeting the late Alexander Gerschenkron, who introduced me to the scholarly study of the Soviet economy, and later, after the war, helped steer me into government research, doctoral study, and an academic career. Thanks to him I have tended to see the Soviet economy within its social and historical continua, that is, inseparable from the country’s polity and culture, ruling ideology, and history.
This made me somewhat of a generalist in the study of the Soviet economy: I tend to look at it holistically, as a system, as a seamless web (perhaps paradoxically, but defensibily, for an economy chronically characterised by mircoand macrodisequilibria in the theorist’s sense).
Accordingly, I gravitated toward systemic investigation of the ‘common economy’ and of attempts at reforming it, the influence of doctrine on the system, the place of money in the command economy, and the like.
I have been interested in the antinomy between administrative authority and ‘economic’ forces, a conflict that helps sustain the chronic repressed inflation and its reverse effects on the system. More recently, I’ve been absorbed in a study of the ‘second economy’ the aggregate of legal-private and illegal activities, which in large measure is both a creature of and a shaping influence on the command system.