Simon Kuznets

Simon Kuznets was a Russian-born American economist who received the 1971 Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences for his empirically grounded interpretation of economic growth. He developed the modern concept of gross national product and the Kuznets curve hypothesis linking inequality to development stages.

Born on April 30, 1901, in Pinsk in the Russian Empire, now Belarus, Simon Smith Kuznets was the son of Abraham Kuznets, a furrier, and Pauline Friedman. The family moved to Kharkiv in present-day Ukraine, where he attended the Second Kharkiv Gymnasium and then the Kharkiv Institute of Commerce, studying under the economists Stanislav Kohn and Pyotr Fomin during the early Soviet period.

Kuznets emigrated to the United States in 1922 and joined his father in New York. He earned bachelor's, master's, and doctoral degrees in economics from Columbia University, completing his PhD in 1926 under Wesley Clair Mitchell.

He joined the National Bureau of Economic Research in 1927 and pioneered the construction of national income accounts for the United States Department of Commerce, producing the first official estimates in 1934. He taught at the University of Pennsylvania from 1930 to 1954, Johns Hopkins from 1954 to 1960, and Harvard from 1960 until his retirement in 1971. His books National Income and Its Composition and Modern Economic Growth shaped postwar development economics. He died in Cambridge, Massachusetts on July 8, 1985, aged 84.

His name Simon derives from the Hebrew name Shimon, meaning he has heard. Simon is a common masculine name in English, French, and German-speaking countries.