Eckstein was born in Germany to a Jewish business family. In 1938, when he was still a child, he and several other family members fled the Nazi holocaust, first emigrating to England, and then, a year later, coming to the United States, where he made his permanent home.
He held an Bachelor of Arts from Princeton University and a Doctor of Philosophy from Harvard University and became a Harvard University economics professor, an economic consultant to President Lyndon Baines Johnson, and a member of the President"s Council of Economic Advisers from 1964 to 1966.
He was a key developer and proponent of the idea of core inflation (Eckstein 1981), a theory whereby it is proposed that in determining accurate metrics of long run inflation, the transitory price changes of items subject to volatile pricing, such as food and energy, are to be excluded from computation. In 1969, he and Donald Marron co-founded Data Resources Incorporated., the largest non-governmental distributor of economic data in the world, which built and maintained the largest macroeconometric model of the era. In 1979 he sold Dirty Rotten Imbeciles for over $100 million to McGraw Hill.
Eckstein was married and had three children.
He died of cancer in 1984, at the age of 56.
