Simon Kuznets

Origins and early life

Simon Smith Kuznets was born in Pinsk, then in the Russian Empire and now in Belarus, on 30 April 1901, into a Jewish family; he had two brothers, Solomon and George.

Work and career

He went to school first at the Realschule in Rivne and then in Kharkiv, and entered the Kharkiv Institute of Commerce in 1918, reading economics, statistics, history and mathematics, where a curriculum that insisted on studying economies with real data and in their wider setting shaped everything he did afterwards. His first paper, on factory wages in Kharkiv in 1920, came out of work for a trade-union bureau. The family emigrated to the United States in 1922, and at Columbia, under Wesley Clair Mitchell, he took a bachelor's degree in 1923, a master's in 1924 and a doctorate in 1926.

In 1931 Mitchell put him in charge of the National Bureau of Economic Research's work on national income, and in 1934 he delivered to the United States its first official estimate of what the country produced, covering 1929 to 1932 and later extended back to 1869. His figures became the standard, and the modern system of national accounts and the idea of gross domestic product grew out of them. He also warned against the use later made of it, writing that the welfare of a nation can scarcely be inferred from a measure of national income.

Later years

He taught at Pennsylvania, Johns Hopkins from 1954 and Harvard from 1961 until he retired in 1970, received the 1971 Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences, and died on 8 July 1985.