Simon Kuznets in Person and in Writing

Abstract

It is rare that our association with a person becomes a lifelong asset and that we bear this person's image with us as part of ourselves. It is only in this way that I can pay tribute to Simon Kuznets. His image as an illustrious scientist is intertwined with his image as a wise mentor and a friend. Scholar The written Kuznets is available to any reader. There, among printed pages and dense tables, we find Kuznets's scientific contribution. This contribution was surveyed and discussed widely when, in 1971, he won the Nobel Prize in economics. One would have thought that a survey of the scientific achievement of a person who was 70 years old at the time would hardly need updating, but in the decade following the award, Kuznets wrote another important chapter in his professional biography. Simon Kuznets was born at the beginning of the century in Russia, where he began his studies and even managed to work at the equivalent of the Bureau of Labor Statistics after the Revolution. He emigrated to the United States in 1921, earned his Ph.D., and then became professor (first of statistics, then of economics) at the University of Pennsylvania, Johns Hopkins, and Harvard. He passed away in July 1985 at his home in Cambridge, Massachusetts. It was Simon Kuznets who, together with a very few others, set the standard for the quantitative study of economies. The economic unit that interested him was the national economy as a whole, which alone can give expression to the economic facet of human society as a living organism. Unlike many of his colleagues, he was an economist rooted in the social sciences, whose observations were based on wide reading in history, sociology, anthropology, and demography, and whose work modestly reflected his erudition. The broad perspective