Simon Kuznets

Simon Smith Kuznets was born in the Russian Empire, today Belarus in the town of Pinsk to Lithuanian-Jewish parents, in the year 1901. He completed his schooling, first at the Rivne, then, Kharkiv Realschule of present-day Ukraine. In 1918, Kuznets entered the Kharkiv Institute of Commerce where he studied economic sciences, statistics, history and mathematics under the guidance of professors P. Fomin (political economy), A. Antsiferov (statistics), V. Levitsky (economic history and economic thought), S. Bernstein (probability theory), V. Davats (mathematics), and others. Basic academic courses at the Institute helped him to acquire "exceptional" erudition in economics, as well as in history, demography, statistics and natural sciences. According to the institute's curriculum, development of the national economies had to be analyzed in the wider context of changes in connected spheres and with involvement of proper methods and empirical data. There he began to study economics and became exposed to Joseph Schumpeter's theory of innovation and the business cycle.

In 1922, the Kuznets family emigrated to the United States. Kuznets then studied at Columbia University under the guidance of Wesley Clair Mitchell. He graduated with a B.S. in 1923, M.A. in 1924, and Ph.D. in 1926. As his magister thesis, he defended the essay "Economic system of Dr. Schumpeter, presented and analyzed", written in Kharkiv. From 1925 to 1926, Kuznets spent time studying economic patterns in prices as the Research Fellow at the Social Science Research Council. It was this work that led to his book "Secular Movements in Production and Prices", defended as a doctoral thesis and published in 1930.

In 1927, he became a member of the research staff of the National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER), where he worked until 1961. From 1931 until 1936, Kuznets was a part-time professor at the University of Pennsylvania. In 1937 he was elected as a Fellow of the American Statistical Association. He was elected to the Pi Gamma Mu social science honor society chapter at the University of Pennsylvania and actively served as a chapter officer in the 1940s; becoming a full-time professor 1936 until 1954. In 1954, Kuznets moved to Johns Hopkins University, where he was Professor of Political Economy until 1960. From 1961 until his retirement in 1970, Kuznets taught at Harvard.

In 1931, at Mitchell's behest, Kuznets took charge of the NBER's work on U.S. national income accounts. In 1934, an assessment of the national income of the United States for the period 1929–1932 was given; further, it was extended to 1919–1938, and then, until 1869. Although Kuznets was not the first economist to try this, his work was so comprehensive and meticulous that it set the standard in the field.

Apart from that, Kuznets collaborated with a number of research organizations and government agencies. In 1931–1934, at Mitchell's behest, Kuznets took charge of the NBER's work on U.S. national income accounts, given the first official estimation of the US national income. In 1936, Kuznets took the lead in establishing the Conference on Research Income and Wealth, which brought together government officials and academic economists, engaged in the development of the U.S. national income and product accounts, and in 1947 helped to establish its international counterpart, the International Association for Research in Income and Wealth.

The hypothesis gave birth to what would become the first formal consumption function. However, Kuznets shook the economic world by finding that Keynes' predictions, while seemingly accurate in short-run cross-sections, broke down under more rigorous examination. In his 1942 tome Uses of National Income in Peace and War, published by the National Bureau of Economic Research, Kuznets became the first economist to show that the Absolute Income Hypothesis gives inaccurate predictions in the long run (by using time-series data). Keynes had predicted that as aggregate income increases, so will marginal savings. Kuznets used new data to show that, over a longer span of time (1870s – 1940s) the savings ratio remained constant, despite large changes in income. This paved the way for Milton Friedman's permanent income hypothesis, and several more modern alternatives such as the life-cycle hypothesis and the relative income hypothesis.

Among his several observations which sparked important theoretical research programs was the Kuznets curve, an inverted U-shaped relation between income inequality and economic growth (1955, 1963). In poor countries, economic growth increased the income disparity between rich and poor people. In wealthier countries, economic growth narrowed the difference. By noting patterns of income inequality in developed and underdeveloped countries, he proposed that as countries experienced economic growth, the income inequality first increases and then decreases. The reasoning was that in order to experience growth, countries had to shift from agricultural to industrial sectors. While there was little variation in the agricultural income, industrialization led to large differences in income. Additionally, as economies experienced growth, mass education provided greater opportunities which decreased the inequality and the lower income portion of the population gained political power to change governmental policies. He also discovered the patterns in savings-income behavior which launched the life-cycle-permanent-income hypothesis of Modigliani and Friedman. He conducted his research for many years and finally published his findings in 1963.

Kuznets was awarded by the Sveriges Riksbank Prize in Economic Sciences in Memory of Alfred Nobel in 1971 "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".

Simon Kuznets died on July 8, 1985, at the age of 84. In 2013 The Kharkiv National University of Economics where he studied in 1918–1921 was named after him (Semen Kuznets Kharkiv National University of Economics).

Simon Kuznets’ Birthday: University Celebrates

Simon Kuznets was the first to study the interdependences between economic fluctuations and long-term economic growth