SIMON KUZNETS, ECONOMICS PIONEER, NOBEL WINNER, HARVARD PROFESSOR
Author:
Date: Thursday, July 11, 1985
Page: 43
Section: OBITUARY
Simon Kuznets, a pioneer in national economics measurements, economics
professor emeritus at Harvard University and the 1971 Nobel Prize laureate in
economics, died yesterday in his Cambridge home. He was 84.
Mr. Kuznets was responsible for developing methods by which nations could
measure their growth national product.
A pioneer in developing the use of national income accounts as a tool to
study prosperity, depression and growth, Mr. Kuznets devoted his career to the
quantitative characteristics of the long-term economic growth of nations.
His study, "National Income and its Composition, 1919 to 1938," was
influential worldwide. It provided the method many countries use to determine
their growth national product. It was published in 1941.
Mr. Kuznets was a faculty member at the University of Pennsylvania for 24
years and professor of political economy at Johns Hopkins University from 1954
until he joined the Harvard staff in 1960. He retired in 1971 and was given
the title of George F. Baker professor emeritus of economics.
He was a former president of the American Economic and the American
Statistical associations.
A. Michael Spence, dean of the Harvard Faculty of Arts and Sciences,
himself a nationally recognized economist, called Mr. Kuznets "one of the
great economists of the 20th century. His national income accounts made modern
macroeconomics possible as a branch of empirical social science . . . He
profoundly influenced several generations of students and scholars who speak
of him often with reverence and affection."
Another friend and fellow Nobel laureate, Paul Samuelson, institute
professor emeritus at Massachusetts Institute of Technology, said yesterday:
''Simon Kuznets was a giant in 20th century economics. He was the founder of
national income measurement, and he created quantitative economic history."
Mr. Kuznets' interests spanned the nation, the developing world and Israel,
where he was instrumental in establishing the Falk Institute for Economic
Research.
John Kenneth Galbraith, the Paul M. Warburg professor of economics emeritus
at Harvard, called him: "The most influential and assuredly one of the best-
loved economists of our time . . . To his scientific achievement must be
added mention of a wonderfully kind, thoughtful and reflective personality, as
those of us who were his friends will attest."
In 1971, announcing Mr. Kuznets as recipient of the Nobel Prize, the
Swedish Royal Academy of Science cited his "empirically founded
interpretation of economic growth which has led to new and deepened insight
into economic and social structure and process of development."
Mr. Kuznets' other important publications include: "Secular Movements in
Production and Prices" (1930), "Modern Economic Growth: Rate, Structure and
Spread" (1966) and "Economic Growth of Nations" (1971), which earned him a
shared Harvard University Press Faculty Prize.
A native of Kharkov, Russia, he came to the United States in 1922 and
earned his bachelor of science degree in 1923, a master of arts degree in 1924
and his doctorate in 1926, all from Columbia University.
During World War II, he was associate director of the Bureau of Planning
and Statistics on the War Production Board, and he served on the staff of the
National Bureau of Economic Research from 1927 to 1960.
Mr. Kuznets also was a fellow of both the American Statistical Association
and of the Econometric Society. He was an honorary fellow of the Royal
Statistical Society of England, a member of the Royal Swedish Academy of
Science and the International Statistical Institute and the American
Philosophical Society.
He served on many committees, among them the Committees on Economic Growth
and on the Economics of Mainland China for the Social Science Research
Council, and he lectured widely, planning the curriculum and lecturing in the
first year of graduate teaching of economics at the National University of
Taiwan. He also delivered the Marshall Lectures at the University of Cambridge
in 1969.
His honorary degrees were conferred upon him by Harvard, Princeton,
Columbia, the University of Pennsylvania, the University of New Hampshire and
by Hebrew University of Jerusalem.
He leaves his wife, Edith (Handler); a daughter, Judith Stein of Rochester,
N.Y.; a son, Paul of Bloomington, Ind.; and four grandchildren.
Funeral arrangements are incomplete.
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