Background
JUSTER, F. Thomas was born in 1926 in Hollis, New York, United States of America.
JUSTER, F. Thomas was born in 1926 in Hollis, New York, United States of America.
Bachelor of Science(Education) Rutgers University, 1949. Doctor of Philosophy Columbia University, 1956.
Senior Research Analyst, Central Intelligence Agency,
3. Assistant Professor, Amherst College, 1953-1959. Research Staff, Senior Research Staff, National Bureau of Economie Research, New York, New York, United States of America, 1959-1964, 1964-1973.
Joel Dean Associates, 1964-1966.
Director, Institute, for Social Research, Professor of Economics, University Michigan, Ann Arbor, Michigan, United States of America, since 1973. Editor, Economics Outlook, United States of America, 1973.
( The Description for this book, Anticipations and Purcha...)
Much of my professional career has been spent in studying the behaviour of households, initially in its cyclical aspects with respect to purchase decisions and saving rates, more recently in its secular aspects with respect to the use of resources to produce well-being. In analysis of cyclical behaviour, much of the work has focussed on the role of expectational or anticipatory phenomena in explaining consumer decisions. This interest leads naturally to the use of survey data of one kind or another in analysis of purchase and saving decisions.
My more recent interest in secular
trends in household behaviour, which is focused on the generation of well-being, had its original roots in a concern with the degree to which conventional national income measurements misrepresented both the distribution and the change over time in household income. My current interest in household allocation of time, and the development of micro-oriented social accounting systems based on time allocation, grows naturally out of an interest in the development of comprehensive measures of well-being that go well beyond conventional monetary transaction flows. There is thus a natural progression in this work from a concern over the deficiencies of the conventional transactionsbased Gross National Product measures of output and income to the development of a comprehensive framework for the measurement of well-being, where the ultimate resource constraints are represented by the stock of wealth accumulated in the past and available time.
Virtually all of my scientific interests reflect a concern with measurement issues related to the behavioural responses of economic units. Those convictions lead naturally to a concern with a generation of relevant behavioural measurements, typically obtained from surveys of economic units, and to a concern with building behavioural models that seem relevant to decision processes rather than to an interest in models characterised by consistency, completeness, or structural elegance.