Papers of Simon Smith Kuznets

Simon Smith Kuznets (1901-1985), was a Russian-born American economist and statistician who received the 1971 Nobel Prize for Economics "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." Kuznets's work on national income accounts and economic growth introduced the concept of the Gross National Product, pioneering a quantitative approach to economic studies.

Kuznets, born in Kharkov, Russia (now Kharkiv, Ukraine), immigrated to the United States in 1922. He received his BA (1923), MA (1924), and PhD in economics (1924), all from Columbia University. Kuznets was a researcher for the National Bureau of Economic Research in New York from 1927 to 1961 and held professional appointments in economics at the University of Pennsylvania (1930-1954), John Hopkins University (1954-1960), and Harvard University (1960-1971). During World War II, from 1942 to 1944, Kuznets was the associate director of the Bureau of Planning and Statistics of the United States War Production Board. Kuznets was elected president of the American Statistical Association (1949) and the American Economic Association (1954).

In his research, Kuznets emphasized the importance of fundamental economic data by stressing that reliable results can be derived only through large numbers of observations. Kuznets insisted that economic data must include information on population structure, technology, the quality of labor, government structure, trade, and markets to provide an accurate economic model. Before Kuznets's work, many economists used theory and neglected economic data to develop conclusions. In 1971, Kuznets received the Nobel Prize in Economics for his research on the economic growth of nations and the development of methods for calculating the size of and changes in national income. In his study of modern economic growth, National Income and its Composition, 1919-1938 (1941), Kuznets described new methods by which countries could determine their national growth. Kuznets's other important publications includeSecular Movements in Production and Prices (1930),Modern Economic Growth: Rate, Structure, and Spread (1966) and the Economic Growth of Nations (1971) which earned him a shared Harvard University Press Faculty Prize. Kuznets served on committees of the Social Science Research Council and 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.

Kuznets married Edith H. Handler (1902-1998) in 1929. Edith was an assistant at the National Bureau of Economic Research. They had two children: Paul and Judith.