Kuznets, Simon (Smith)

(born April 30, 1901, Kharkov, Ukraine, Russian Empire—died July 8, 1985, Cambridge, Mass., U.S.) Russian-U.S. economist and statistician. He immigrated to the U.S. in 1922 and joined the National Bureau of Economic Research in 1927; he later taught at the University of Pennsylvania (1930–54), Johns Hopkins University (1954–60), and Harvard University (1960–71). His work emphasized the complexity of underlying data in the construction of economic models, stressing the need for information on population structure, technology, labour quality, government structure, trade, and markets. He also described the existence of cyclical variations in growth rates (now called “Kuznets cycles”) and their links with underlying factors such as population. In 1971 he received the Nobel Prize.

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