Warren Nutter Research Articles

BEFORE NBER: WARREN NUTTER’S SOVIET RESEARCH AT THE CIA

Warren Nutter’s work as director of the National Bureau of Economic Research’s (NBER) Soviet growth project is his best-known contribution to economics and public affairs. Many histories of Sovietology note the oddity of Nutter’s selection as project director, given his apparent lack of prior experience studying the Soviet Union. This paper provides new context for Nutter’s selection to lead the NBER effort. From 1951 to 1952 Nutter was the acting chief of the Economic Capabilities Branch of the CIA’s Office of Research and Reports (ORR), and chairman of the Economic Analysis Subcommittee of the interagency Economic Intelligence Committee. In this capacity he managed at least three major research efforts, including an input-output analysis of the Soviet Union and contributions to two national intelligence estimates. Nutter may have been proposed as director of the NBER project by Robert Amory, the Deputy Director of Intelligence, in 1953. Nutter’s research for the CIA cultivated new analytic capacities for the agency and provided a foundation for his own work on the Soviet Union.

“Marco Polo Economics” and Narrative in the NBER Soviet Growth Study

Abstract In his 1962 NBER volume, The Growth of Industrial Production in the Soviet Union, Warren Nutter writes about how the study of the Soviet economy was hamstrung by official secrecy and data limitations. Western economists were forced to rely on what Nutter called “Marco Polo economics” or “travelers' tales” to replace or interpret quantitative data. Nutter's book is littered with these tales of Soviet economic activity from Soviet émigrés, foreign visitors, and reports of Soviet citizens. The tales provide a narrative grounding for The Growth of Industrial Production in the Soviet Union by outlining the flow of data through the Soviet statistical bureaucracy, establishing the strengths and limitations of Soviet data, and aiding in the interpretation of difficult-to-measure concepts such as product quality and military production.

“Marco Polo Economics” and Narrative in the NBER Soviet Growth Study

In his 1962 NBER volume, Growth of Industrial Production in the Soviet Union, Warren Nutter writes about how the study of the Soviet economy was hamstrung by official secrecy and misinformation. Western economists were forced to rely on what Nutter called “Marco Polo economics” or “travelers’ tales” to replace or interpret quantitative data. Nutter’s book is littered with these tales of Soviet economic activity from Soviet emigres, foreign visitors, and reports of Soviet citizens. The tales provide a narrative grounding for Growth of Industrial Production in the Soviet Union by outlining the flow of data through the Soviet statistical bureaucracy, establishing the reliability of Soviet data, and aiding in the interpretation of difficult to measure concepts like product quality or military production.

The real purpose of the program: a case study in James M. Buchanan’s efforts at academic entrepreneurship to “save the books” in economics

Using archival material from the Thomas Jefferson Center for the Study of Political Economy and first-person recollections from relevant figures, we reconstruct James M. Buchanan’s mission (in partnership with G. Warren Nutter) to “save the books” in the related but distinct disciplines of economics and political economy. From his graduate days at the University of Chicago in the late 1940s, Buchanan was worried about dominant trends in mainstream economics which would carry the field away from its core. In particular, Buchanan was worried that political economy was becoming unmoored from the types of philosophic and institutional analysis which were previously central to the field. In its flight from reality, Buchanan feared economics was in danger of abandoning social-philosophic issues for exclusively technical questions. More than this, Buchanan feared that economists were asserting their authority as benevolent social planners. In response to these fears, Buchanan sought to (re)create an economics which would balance the science of economics and the art of political economy—an economics which began with an explicit commitment to democracy and would integrate philosophy, institutional thinking, and technical, price-theoretic economics, into a coherent working paradigm for research and graduate education.

Before NBER: Warren Nutter's Soviet Research at the CIA

Warren Nutter’s work as director of the National Bureau of Economic Research’s (NBER’s) Soviet growth project is his best-known contribution to economics and public affairs. Many histories of Sovietology note the oddity of Nutter’s selection as project director, given his apparent lack of prior experience studying the Soviet Union. This paper provides new context for Nutter’s selection to lead the NBER effort. From 1951 to 1952 Warren Nutter was the Acting Chief of the Economic Capabilities Branch of the CIA’s Office of Research and Reports (ORR), and Chairman of the Economic Analysis Subcommittee of the inter-agency Economic Intelligence Committee. In this capacity he managed at least three major research efforts, including an input-output analysis of the Soviet Union and contributions to two national intelligence estimates. Nutter may have been proposed as a director of the NBER project by Robert Amory, the Deputy Director of Intelligence, in 1953. Nutter’s research for the CIA cultivated new analytic capacities for the agency and provided a foundation for Nutter’s future work on the Soviet Union.

‘We Can Get a Coup’: Warren Nutter and the Overthrow of Salvador Allende

In 1969, Warren Nutter left the University of Virginia Department of Economics to serve as the Assistant Secretary of Defense for International Security Affairs in the Nixon administration. During his time in the Defense Department, Nutter was deeply involved in laying the groundwork for a military coup against the democratically elected president of Chile, Salvador Allende. Although Nutter left the Pentagon several months before the successful 1973 coup, his role in Chile was far more direct than the better-known cases of Friedrich Hayek, Milton Friedman, James Buchanan, and Arnold Harberger. This chapter describes Nutter’s role in Chile policymaking in the Nixon administration. It shows how Nutter’s criticisms of Henry Kissinger are grounded in his economics, and compares and contrasts Nutter with other economists who have been connected to Pinochet’s dictatorship.

Accommodation Within the Broad Structure of Voluntary Society: Buchanan and Nutter on School Segregation

Public choice theory coalesced into a school of thought in Charlottesville, Virginia, in the late 1950s and early 1960s at a time when the commonwealth was embroiled in a fight over school segregation. Until very recently, the history of segregation has not informed our understanding of the lives of the key public choice theorists in Virginia. This paper contributes to the discussion of James Buchanan and Warren Nutter’s views on school segregation by exploring neglected archival evidence that suggests Buchanan and Nutter were “moderate segregationists” or “gradualists.” Moderate segregationists accepted the Brown v. Board of Education decision against statutory segregation but believed that integration should occur gradually and at the pace of local sentiment. Buchanan and Nutter inserted themselves into the policy debate on segregation by promoting a private school tuition grant program that channeled public funds to private segregated schools. Buchanan aligned himself with the moderate segregationist views of former governor Colgate Darden, Jr., and disputed President Eisenhower’s authority to force integration in Little Rock, Arkansas. A second contribution of this paper is to provide new evidence that Warren Nutter was personally active in the private school movement in Charlottesville. In 1958, Nutter hosted a basement classroom of twenty-one white seventh graders affected by the school closings in the confrontation between the commonwealth of Virginia and the federal courts.

G. Warren Nutter’s “Traveler’s tale of the Soviet economy”: A witness to the actual world

The text of G. Warren Nutter’s 1956 “Traveler’s tale of the Soviet economy” challenges the belief that only credentialed experts offer useful economic analysis. Nutter’s introduction is a remarkable statement of an approach in which an expert attempts to see the world through eyes unfiltered by theoretical propositions. His distrust of theory is such that his “Tale” was hurriedly written so that these presuppositions did not creep in to “correct” the naive impressions of a tourist. Two decades after Nutter’s trip, Alain Besancon (Survey: A Journal of East and West Studies 25(4): 143–159, 1980) pointed out the inconsistency between the Soviet world described by witnesses and that described by orthodox Western economic models. More recently an inconsistency in the sequences of models in American economic textbooks—faster Soviet growth without catching up to American levels—has been detailed (Levy and Peart Journal of Economic Behavior and Organization 78: 110–125, 2011). A difference between the witnessed world and the modeled world in the sequence of textbooks is that the modeled world was not possible.

'Almost Wholly Negative': The Ford Foundation's Appraisal of the Virginia School

In 1960 the Thomas Jefferson Center [TJC] of the University of Virginia applied for a “massive” grant from the Ford Foundation. Although James Buchanan, Warren Nutter and Ronald Coase had all received grants from Ford, Ford turned down their proposal because of the Center’s unified “point of view.” We report on correspondence and private discussions of the events. Following the submission of their proposal, Buchanan, Nutter and then President of UVA, Edgar Shannon met with representatives of the Ford Foundation, Tom Carroll and Kermit Gordon. Buchanan concluded that the “reaction of the Ford representatives must be considered to have been almost wholly negative.” The crux of the matter, in Gordon’s assessment was the TJC reflected “a single ‘point of view’.” As the conversation unfolded, it became clear to the UVA representatives that by this the Foundation officials meant a narrow ideological perspective, one in line with Chicago-style economics. Buchanan attempted to dispel this conclusion, arguing that the program was “sufficiently broad” to “encompass wide and divergent points of view.” Coase was particularly incensed by allegation of ideological narrowness since, as he explained, he had close ties to the Fabian Society Despite the attempts of both Coase and Buchanan to defend their proposal, Ford officials turned down the application and the TJC never fully recovered.

On James Buchanan's Public Choice Enterprise

James Buchanan came to Italy in 1955 as Fulbright visiting professor until July 1956 and made his research at the library of the Bank of Italy. He visited the University of Pavia, a quite famous center for public finance studies, still directed by Benvenuto Griziotti. On that occasion I became acquainted with professor Buchanan and our longlasting friendship started soon. On his itinerary from the political economy perspective to public choice that James Buchanan did undertake, after the Italian 1955-56 visit, he has written: «After Italy I was prepared, intellectually, psychologically and emotionally to join in an entrepreneurial venture with my Virginia colleague Warren Nutter, a venture aimed at bringing renewed emphasis to ‘political economy’ in a classical sense. And from these beginnings, the more directed research spin-off into the ‘economics of politics’ initiated jointly with my colleague Gordon Tullock, now seems a natural progression»

Inventing paradigms, monopoly, methodology, and mythology at ‘Chicago’: Nutter, Stigler, and Milton Friedman

This paper aims to contribute to a better understanding of the formation of the so-called Chicago-school of economics; it does so by focusing on (i) previously unpublished correspondence between George Stigler and Thomas Kuhn as well as (ii) Warren Nutter’s The Extent of Enterprise Monopoly in the United States, 1899–1939. Nutter’s book started out as a (1949) doctoral dissertation at The University of Chicago, part of Aaron Director’s Free Market Study. Besides Director, O.H. Brownlee and Milton Friedman were closely involved with supervising it. It was published by The University of Chicago Press in 1951. The book was explicitly understood as belonging to the “Chicago School” (Dow & Abernathy, 1963). But by the time of Reder’s well known (1982) review paper Nutter does not figure at all. I argue that the Stigler-Kuhn correspondence helps us better understand why Nutter disappeared from sight. More important, by contrasting the work of Nutter with that of Harberger, the episode reveals how Milton Friedman’s methodological statements became the rhetoric for a paradigm that was committed to a very different approach than the one advocated by Nutter or Friedman.

Inventing Paradigms, Monopoly, Methodology, and Mythology at 'Chicago': Nutter and Stigler

This paper focuses on Warren Nutter’s The Extent of Enterprise Monopoly in the United States, 1899-1939. This started out as a (1949) doctoral dissertation at The University of Chicago, part of Aaron Director’s Free Market Study. Besides Director, O.H. Brownlee and Milton Friedman were closely involved with supervising it. It was published by The University of Chicago Press in 1951. In the 1950s the book was explicitly understood as belonging to the “Chicago School” (Dow and Abernathy 1963). By articulating the content, context, and reception of Nutter’s monograph, this paper discusses four larger themes. First, I introduce the importance of Kuhnian conceptions of science to the methodological and institutional understanding of economics in the development of a ‘Chicago’ school of economics. I do this in context of previously unpublished Stigler-Kuhn exchange. While Thomas Kuhn was widely read and adopted in the social sciences and humanities in the 1960s and 70s (and thereafter), I argue that at ‘Chicago,’ proto-Kuhnian language can be found going back to the 1940s; in those early days it is partly used to disparage the achievements of economic theorizing as promoted by others. A more self-congratulatory Kuhnian self-understanding of economics as a mature paradigm starts to get adopted around 1955 by George Stigler. One important new claim is that the later Kuhnian language gets adopted in part to divest ‘Chicago’ from its shared roots with Institutionalist economics. So, this paper contributes to a better understanding of the formation of a shared narrative at ‘Chicago.’ Second, I introduce contextual themes from Milton Friedman’s writings in the late 40s and 50s to help us understand the nature of realism at Chicago. Nutter’s dissertation helps in reading and illuminating Milton Friedman’s famous 1953 methodology paper in historical and intellectual context. Third, while this chapter notes some of the political ramifications of Chicago economics, my main aim is to help explain the manner in which Chicago attempted to chart a distinctive methodological course. This methodology has often been described as Marshallian with debts to the large-scale NBER studies. Rather than going over familiar territory, I call attention to the importance of proxies in Nutter’s empirical methodology. It is an unappreciated feature of the inductive, quantitative method that focused on the component structures of the economy that characterizes Chicago’s methodological outlook in this period. I show this by comparing Nutter’s dissertation to work done by Stigler, then at Columbia. We know from Stigler’s correspondence with Friedman that in this period they discussed methodological matters. What is less well known is that Friedman is explicitly credited for Stigler’s methodological insights in Stigler's Five Lectures at LSE. The fifth lecture, “Competition in the United States,” covers similar territory as Nutter’s project. Comparing the work by Stigler and Nutter sheds light on the nature of Chicago methodology as it was being developed away from foundations laid by Frank Knight and Henry Simons in the late 1940s and 1950s and opening up the door to (right wing) social engineering as exemplified by Harberger. I present my analysis through the published critical reception of both works among economists. A fourth reason to focus on Nutter’s dissertation is that it was featured in a Fortune magazine article in January 1952. So, it provides a useful entry into how politically important ‘Chicago’ research was marketed to a wider audience. This connects to issues explored by Phil Mirowski and his students, Rob van Horn and Eddie Nik-kah. So, Nutter’s dissertation can help us see how ‘sponsored’ research looks at ‘Chicago at the time. This is especially important because it has been claimed that Director’s Free Market Study group promoted a change from classically liberal views on monopoly, which condemned labor and employer monopolies, to a more pro-business stance.

Obituary: The sayer of truth: A personal tribute to Peter Bauer

Objectively considered, and apart from a long-standing personal friendship, Peter Bauer had a formative influence on my own career. Almost singlehandedly he orchestrated my academic year at Cambridge University in 196162. In 1960 or thereabouts, when Peter was just leaving Cambridge for the London School of Economics, he realized that there was an open slot for the public finance lectures after Alan Prest's departure. Peter encouraged me to, first, express an interest and, second, to accept the invitation once offered. Meanwhile, he somehow accomplished the more difficult task of getting the university to invite me a neophyte from the boondocks of American academia. And life among the tribes in Cambridge opened my eyes to the sometimes idealized world of high-table talk and Oxbridge snobbery. But to be a guest of Sir Dennis Robertson at a Trinity College feast, and to see James Meade at his best, and Joan Robinson at her worst-these were experiences to be treasured, the latter made all the more surprising when I learned from Peter that he had been Joan's assistant for two years while he was a student. During my three separate stints at LSE, all in the 1960s, Peter and Basil Yamey, Peter's coauthor, were my best friends, both in the common room and in the social setting outside the academic halls. Over many meals, at the Bauer, Buchanan, or Yamey establishments, we resolved most issues of the world and subjected our economist peers to the criticism they really did deserve. And shopping with Peter Bauer, a man of impeccable taste, among the London antique shops for just the proper small piece of furniture was, for me, an entry to a culture to which I could only aspire to, never achieve. At times, however, Peter did not quite seem to fit the niche that he wanted to occupy, as instance the Hurlingham Club, an establishment that appeared a bit more sporting than Peter, even at his best. Peter Bauer was among the very first, if not the first, distinguished lecturer that Warren Nutter and I invited to the University of Virginia after we set up the Thomas Jefferson Center for Studies in Political Economy and Social

Political Economy and Freedom: A Collection of Essays

These thirty-three essays, many of them previously unpublished, illustrate the broad range of Warren Nutter's thought. There are essays on the Soviet economy and international relations as well as essays exploring the economic institutions that support a society of free people. One finds in these essays a man of intellect and judgment ever ready to look at the evidence and ever willing to admit imperfections of even the best human institutions. He defends capitalism not because it is perfect but because for this imperfect world it is superior to the attainable alternatives.

Inflation in the Planned Economies: Some Estimates for Eastern Europe

The desirability of constructing independent measures of economic activity within centrally-planned economies has been urged by all scholars familiar with the incomplete and often ambiguous nature of officially released statistics. In particular, price indices of the Soviet Union and Eastern European (Soviet-type) economies are viewed with considerable suspicion. Warren Nutter [6], for example, has argued that Soviet .. statistics are grist for the propaganda mill, . and consequently, officially reported indices suffer from lack of reliability because of selectivity, ambiguity, and misrepresentation. More recently, a comprehensive evaluation of Soviet price statistics led Morris Bornstein [2] to conclude that these statistics .. are of little help in measuring inflationary pressure. These statements suggest two possible sources of unreliability in the reported indexes. One is outright misrepresentation, for whatever reasons, by the authorities. Second, and of perhaps even more importance, is the widespread use of non-price rationing-both formal and informal-as practiced within the planned economies. Such non-pecuniary rationing, as evidenced by perennial shortages, lengthening queues, bulging savings accounts, and the ever present tolkach (expediter), strongly suggests that prices are being held below market-clearing levels. Consequently, even if faithfully reported, list-prices would not capture the degree of inflation which is being repressed through price control. The purpose of this paper is to suggest a method for measuring the extent of domestic inflation within countries for which the officially reported

Kissinger's Grand DesignG. Warren Nutter Washington: American Enterprise Institute for Public Policy Research, 1975, pp. 111

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A Theory of Competition

Previous articleNext article No AccessA Theory of CompetitionG. Warren Nutter, and John H. MooreG. Warren Nutter Search for more articles by this author , and John H. Moore Search for more articles by this author PDFPDF PLUS Add to favoritesDownload CitationTrack CitationsPermissionsReprints Share onFacebookTwitterLinkedInRedditEmail SectionsMoreDetailsFiguresReferencesCited by The Journal of Law and Economics Volume 19, Number 1Apr., 1976 Sponsored by The University of Chicago Booth School of Business and The University of Chicago Law School Article DOIhttps://doi.org/10.1086/466855 Views: 4Total views on this site Citations: 6Citations are reported from Crossref Copyright 1976 The University of Chicago Law SchoolPDF download Crossref reports the following articles citing this article:M. Kabir Hassan, Fahmi Ali Hudaefi, Rezzy Eko Caraka Mining netizen’s opinion on cryptocurrency: sentiment analysis of Twitter data, Studies in Economics and Finance 39, no.33 (Nov 2021): 365–385.https://doi.org/10.1108/SEF-06-2021-0237Tomasz Jacheć Competitive spirit as a form of behavioral addiction: the case study of Michael Jordan, Physical Culture and Sport. Studies and Research 89, no.11 (Jan 2021): 66–83.https://doi.org/10.2478/pcssr-2021-0007Debadutta Kumar Panda Coevolution and coexistence of cooperation and competition in interorganizational collaboration, Journal of Global Operations and Strategic Sourcing 10, no.11 (Feb 2017): 18–41.https://doi.org/10.1108/JGOSS-03-2016-0009Ejan Mackaay Search, (Jan 1982): 145–172.https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-017-5332-6_7Jay G. Chambers An Analysis of School Size Under a Voucher System, Educational Evaluation and Policy Analysis 3, no.22 (Jun 2016): 29–40.https://doi.org/10.3102/01623737003002029J.H. Hatch The cost minimizing number of firms and the discipline of competition, Economics Letters 4, no.44 (Jan 1979): 379–384.https://doi.org/10.1016/0165-1765(79)90189-7

Purges and Production: Soviet Economic Growth, 1928–1940

Did preparations for the Second World War account for the precipitous drop in the growth rate of Soviet industrial production from 10–12 percent per annum in the period 1928–1937 to only 2–3 percent per annum in the period 1937–1940? According to some who study the Soviet economy the answer is “yes.” This view has been succinctly expressed by Stanley Cohn: “After 1937, the rising spectre of Hitler forced the Soviet leadership to shift resources into armaments on a massive scale. As a result, the growth rate fell drastically to 3.6 percent per year between 1937 and 1940.” Such a sequence of events, however, has never been empirically demonstrated. The purpose of this paper is to investigate formally the validity of this explanation, via aggregate production functions, particularly of the CES (constant elasticity of substitution) variety, as well as to explore an alternative hypothesis, espoused, among others, by Naum Jasny, Alec Nove and Warren Nutter. This hypothesis stresses a domestic factor as the major contributor to the disruption in industrial production: namely, the impact of Stalin's terror in the form of chaos-producing political purges.

Planning for Economic Growth in the Soviet Union, 1918–1932. By Eugene Zaleski. Translated from the French and edited by Marie-Christine MacAndrew and G. Warren Nutter. (Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 1971. Pp. 454. $15.75.)

Planning for Economic Growth in the Soviet Union, 1918–1932. By Eugene Zaleski. Translated from the French and edited by Marie-Christine MacAndrew and G. Warren Nutter. (Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 1971. Pp. 454. $15.75.)

Planning Reforms in the Soviet Union, 1962-1966, by Eugène Zaleski, Marie-Christine MacAndrew, G. Warren Nutter

Planning Reforms in the Soviet Union, 1962-1966, <i>by Eugène Zaleski, Marie-Christine MacAndrew, G. Warren Nutter</i>