In 1818, Kuznets entered Kharkiv Institute of Commerce (present-day Kharkiv National University of Economics), where he remained until 1921.
Gallery of Simon Kuznets
116th St & Broadway, New York, NY 10027, United States
In 1922, Simon enrolled at Columbia University in New York City, earning his Bachelor of Science degree in 1923 and a Master of Arts degree in 1924.
Career
Gallery of Simon Kuznets
1971
In 1971, Simon Kuznets received the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences "for his empirically founded interpretation of economic growth, which has led to new and deepened insight into the economic and social structure and process of development."
In 1971, Simon Kuznets received the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences "for his empirically founded interpretation of economic growth, which has led to new and deepened insight into the economic and social structure and process of development."
(The two essays in this volume can be termed essential bui...)
The two essays in this volume can be termed essential building blocks for constructing a systematic approach toward a theory of economic growth. Drawing on his noted quantitative studies of modern economic growth, Professor Kuznets presents his views on the complex growth process and analyzes the implications of such specific factors as population, urbanization, industrialization, agriculture and trade between nations. He discusses the relationship of social and political structure to economic processes, and how economic growth is affected by international relations, as well as by the internal conditions of the society.
(The essays center on a few broad themes: population and i...)
The essays center on a few broad themes: population and its relation to economic growth, capital formation in long historical perspective, the broader features of modern economic growth and recent changes in the gap between the rich and poor countries.
(This work contains nine essays, that range from historica...)
This work contains nine essays, that range from historical overviews to detailed analyses of fertility, population and the distribution of income, and deals with economic change in developed and underdeveloped countries.
Simon Kuznets was an American economist, researcher, statistician and author of many scientific works, who won the Nobel Prize in 1971 for pioneering the use of a nation's gross national product to analyze economic growth. Kuznets made a great contribution to economic history and economics as a science. He was also known as the author of the Kuznets swing and Kuznets curve.
Background
Simon Kuznets was born on April 30, 1901, in Pinsk, Minsk Governorate, Russian Empire (present-day Pinsk, Brestskaya Voblasts', Belarus). He was a son of Abraham Kuznets, a fur dealer, and Pauline (Friedman) Kuznets. Simon was the second of three sons in the family.
Education
Simon began his primary education in Pinsk. Later, at the age of nine or ten, he moved with his family to Rovno in Eastern Ukraine, a part of Russian Empire at that time. There, they lived with his mother’s family, who were well-to-do furriers.
In Rovno, Simon enrolled at the secondary school. Concurrently, he received his training in Judaism and Jewish history from his grandparents. Thus, he was raised in the mixture of secular and Jewish heritage.
In October, 1916, Simon entered Kharkiv High school for his secondary education. It was at that school, that he was first introduced to economics. During that period, Simon was much influenced by Joseph Schumpeter's theory of innovation and the business cycle.
In 1818, Kuznets entered Kharkiv Institute of Commerce (present-day Kharkiv National University of Economics). There, he had rigorous training in statistical and empirical methods and acquired a thorough knowledge in Economics, History, Demography, Statistics and Natural Sciences. He remained at the institute until 1921 without completing his courses there.
In 1922, the Kuznets family emigrated to the United States. The same year, Simon enrolled at Columbia University in New York City and resumed his studies in Economics, earning his Bachelor of Science degree in 1923 and a Master of Arts degree in 1924.
In 1925, Simon Kuznets joined the Social Science Research Council as a Research Fellow. There, he studied economic patterns in prices for one and half years with Wesley Clair Mitchell. Later, he defended the work as his doctoral thesis and earned his Doctor of Philosophy degree in 1926 from Columbia University. Many of his future research efforts were actually based on this doctoral dissertation, entitled "Cyclical Fluctuations in Retail and Wholesale Trade".
During his lifetime, he also received honorary degrees from different educational establishments, including Harvard University, Princeton University, Columbia University and others.
In 1927, Simon started his career as a member of research staff at the National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER), an American private nonprofit research organization, co-founded by his doctoral advisor Wesley Clair Mitchell. Kuznets continued to work at the organization till 1961. There, at NBER, he proceeded to expand on his doctoral dissertation, basing his work on the long series of economic dynamics, undertaken in the United States in the middle of 1920's. In 1930, he published the result as "Secular Movements in Production and Prices: Their Nature and Their Bearing upon Cyclical Fluctuations".
In 1931, Kuznets took charge of the NBER's work on the United States national income accounts, given the first official estimation of the United States national income. The same year, he was appointed a part-time professor at the University of Pennsylvania.
Continuing his research on national income at NBER, Kuznets submitted a comprehensive report in 1934. He first provided an assessment of the national income in the United States for the period from 1929 to 1932. Later, it was extended from 1919 to 1938 and finally to 1869. On analyzing them meticulously, he identified certain medium-range economic waves, spanning a period from 15 to 25 years. Thereafter, he connected them with demographic processes, especially with the inflow and outflow of the immigrants and their effect in construction business. Later, Simon denoted these movements as demographic cycles or swings. Today, they are known as "Kuznets Cycles/Swings" and interpreted as the infrastructural investment cycles. The work made him justly famous.
In 1936, Kuznets was appointed a full professor at the University of Pennsylvania, a position he held till 1954. Also, in 1936, Simon was instrumental in establishing the Conference on Research Income and Wealth, a body, comprising of government officials and academics.
In 1942, Kuznets was offered a position of an associate director of the Bureau of Planning and Statistics, War Production Board. His main responsibility was to assess the nation’s capability of expanding its military production and he worked in this capacity till 1944.
After the end of World War II, Simon served as an advisor to a number of economically weak countries, such as China, Japan, India, Korea, Taiwan and Israel. By then, he had moved into a new research area, involving the relation between changes in income and overall growth. His main focus was on demographic growth, growth of knowledge, in-country adaptation to growth factors and external economic relations between the countries. The International Association for Research in Income and Wealth, that he helped to establish in 1947, was the result of this work.
Some time later, Kuznets collaborated with the Growth Center of Yale University to found Social Science Research Council Committee on Economic Growth. During the period from 1949 till 1968, he held a post of the committee's chairman. Holding that post, he worked mainly on the comparative quantitative analysis of economic growth of different nations.
Between 1953 and 1963, he acted as a chairman of the Falk Project for Economic Research in Israel. In 1963, Simon was made a member of the Board of Trustees and honorary chairman of Maurice Falk Institute for Economic Research in Israel.
Some time earlier, in 1954, Kuznets left the University of Pennsylvania to join Johns Hopkins University as the Professor of Political Economy, holding the position till 1960. From 1961 until his retirement in 1970, Kuznets taught at Harvard University. Concurrently, from 1961 to 1970, he was a chairman of the Social Science Research Council Committee on the Economy of China.
Kuznets continued to work well into 1970's. During that period, he mainly worked on the interaction between science and technology, as well as on the institutional shifts. Besides, external factors, such as the moral and political climate in a society, were also the subjects of his study. Towards the end of his career, Simon set up his home in Cambridge, Massachusetts and died there on July 8, 1985.
Although Simon brought up his children strictly in secular American manner, he retained a personal interest in the affairs of Soviet Russia and was a great opponent of the communist regime there.
Views
Simon's views and scientific methodology were highly influenced by methodological settings, received by him in Kharkiv, and fully shared by Wesley Clair Mitchell for the statistical, inductive construction of hypotheses in economics and its empirical testing. Kuznets treated a priori and speculative conceptions with deep skepticism. At the same time, Kuznets tended to analyze economy in connection and with the wider context of historical situation, demographic, social processes, that was peculiar for the Kharkiv academics at the beginning of the 20th century.
The work of such economists and leading theorists, as Joseph A. Schumpeter, A. C. Pigo and Vilfredo Pareto had a great impact on Simon's studies.
Quotations:
"The welfare of a nation can scarcely be inferred from a measurement of national income as defined by the GDP."
"Memorable occasions should be brief, and so should be the expressions of appreciation."
"Mass application of technological innovations, which constitutes much of the distinctive substance of modern economic growth, is closely connected with the further progress of science, in its turn the basis for additional advance in technology."
"The dynamic drives of modern economic growth, in the countries, that entered the process ahead of others, meant a reaching out geographically; and the sequential spread of the process, facilitated by major changes in transport and communication, meant a continuous expansion to the less developed areas."
"It was at the graduate school at Columbia University, that I first met Wesley C. Mitchell, with whom I was associated for many years at the National Bureau of Economic Research and to whom I owe a great intellectual debt."
"Does inequality in the distribution of income increase or decrease in the course of a country's economic growth?"
"War and peace type products... cannot be added into a national product total until the differences in the valuation due to differences in the institutional mechanisms, that determine their respective market prices, are corrected for."
"When, over fifty years ago, I first became interested in economics — as a discipline, that provided the key to social structure and social problems — it never crossed my mind, that one day I might be the honored recipient of a Nobel Memorial Prize."
"With the rather stable ratio of labor force to total population, a high rate of increase in per capita product means a high rate of increase in product per worker; and, with average hours of work declining, it means still higher growth rates in product per man-hour."
"Economists must always be prepared for surprises: they find many in trying to find order in the universe of their study."
"With the variety of fields within economics, broadly conceived and the increasing specialization of scholarly world, the award of a Nobel Memorial Prize honors not only the individual scholar but, implicitly, also a special field or a distinctive method."
Membership
Simon was an honorable member of the Association of Economic History, Royal Statistical Society of England and a member of the Econometric Society, International Statistical Institute, American Philosophical Society, Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences, as well as a corresponding member of the British Academy.
American Economic Association
,
United States
1954
American Statistical Association
,
United States
1949
Personality
Simon was an avid reader of Russian literature and like most other Jewish people was highly affected by the Holocaust.
Connections
Simon married Edith Handler on June 29, 1929. Their marriage produced two children - Paul and Judith Stein.