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Outlines of Agricultural Economics; a Class-Book of Questions and Problems
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Edwin Griswold Nourse was an American economist, teacher, author, and public servant.
Background
Edwin Griswold Nourse was born on May 20, 1883 in Lockport, New York, United States. He was the son of Harriet Augusta Beaman and Edwin Henry Nourse. He grew up in Chicago, where his father was supervisor of singing in the public schools. An ancestor, Rebecca Nourse, is alleged to have been a victim in the 1692 Salem witchcraft trials.
Education
Nourse graduated from Downer's Grove High School in Downer's Grove, Illinois, in 1901 and then earned his Associate degree from Lewis Institute in Chicago (1904), his Bachelor's degree from Cornell University (1906), and his Doctor of Philosophy from the University of Chicago (1915).
Career
Nourse started his career in 1909 as an instructor in finance at the University of Pennsylvania's Wharton School of Business. As a faculty member at Iowa State College in Ames and at the universities of South Dakota and Arkansas, he attempted to apply business analytical techniques to agriculture, an interest that grew out of his study of agricultural economics at Cornell. In 1922, Nourse joined the Institute of Economics in Washington, D. C. , as chief of its agricultural division. When the institute merged with two other Brookings-endowed research organizations to form the Brookings Institution in 1928, he became the director of the institute (1929 - 1942) and later vice-president of the Brookings Institution (1942 - 1946). In addition, he served as president of the American Farm Economic Association (1924) and edited the Journal of Farm Economics (1925 - 1926).
Nourse's early public career included serving as a delegate to the international Institute of Agriculture's assembly in Rome (1924, 1936) and as a member of the League of Nations Mixed Committee on the Relation of Nutrition to Health, Agriculture and Economic Policy (1935 - 1937).
In 1942, Nourse began a three-year term as chairman of the Social Science Research Council in New York City. In July 1946, President Harry S Truman chose him as chairman of the Economic Advisory Council, the agency created by the Employment Act of 1946. Nourse believed that the council should be an advisory group to the president alone; the council should not take public policy positions, and members were not to appear before congressional committees. When summoned on February 4, 1949, by Senator Joseph O'Mahoney of Wyoming to testify before the Joint Economic Committee on the Economic Report of Congress, Nourse did not testify. He resigned from the council as of October 17, 1949, the date selected by the president. That Nourse was at philosophical odds with Truman cannot be denied.
Truman complained that Nourse never presented him with a clear policy he could adopt, leading him at one point to query: "Can't someone bring me a one-handed economist?" A partial answer may be found in the article "The Gap Between Economist and Politician", by economist Seymour Harris. He began by agreeing with Nourse about the training of economists, but differed with Nourse about its policy implications. Harris believed that economists were duty bound to widen their knowledge into the realm of political economy so as to be able to recommend clear policies. President Truman named Roy Blough, a moderate, to the council and appointed Leon Keyserling, a member, as chairman. Congress was reluctant to finance continuation of the council. According to Nourse, Keyserling was obviously a political appointee, and as chairman his active participation in party affairs drew much criticism. Under President Dwight Eisenhower a reconstituted Council of Economic Advisers was financed and Arthur F. Burns became its chairman. Eisenhower was determined to remove politics from the council.
America's Capacity to Produce (1934) was a landmark study written with five colleagues. He also wrote Marketing Agreements Under the Agriculture Adjustment Act (1935) and, with Joseph S. Davis and John D. Black, Three Years of Agricultural Adjustment Administration (1937). Later Nourse and Horace Drury produced Industrial Price Policies and Economic Progress (1938). His Price Making in a Democracy (1944) was widely acclaimed and used by both labor and management in the wage negotiations at General Motors in October 1945. The 1950's Come First (1951) and Economics in the Public Service (1953) were his last two works.
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Views
Nourse saw a need for government "to insure good feeding and good medical care" for youth until they reached working age. Generally considered a conservative economist because of his belief in the ability of private market forces to govern the economy, he nevertheless foresaw the likelihood of greater government involvement in the economy.
In his article in 1938 on the economic aspects of nutrition he stated the basic elements of his pragmatic philosophy: business should accept "responsibility for the welfare of the entire labor force, " and government had the responsibility "to underwrite a decent minimum standard of subsistence" for those who could not afford an adequate diet.
He believed that the council's advice must be confined to economics. To do otherwise, he felt, would leave council members the choice of supporting the president's position regardless of their professional convictions or of arguing against a policy recommended by the president. Nourse's attempt to separate economics from politics in the council reflected his belief that economists were not trained to provide economic advice with political overtones.
Connections
Nourse married Ray Marie Tyler on August 17, 1910; they had one child.