Simon Kuznets — econ (nobel/gdp) with roots in the Russian Empire
Simon Smith Kuznets was born Semyon Abramovich Kuznets on 30 April 1901 in Pinsk, in the Minsk Governorate of the Russian Empire, now in Belarus, according to the Nobel Foundation and the National Academy of Sciences; Britannica gives his birthplace as Kharkov. He was educated at schools in Rovno and Kharkov, and from 1918 to 1921 studied at the Kharkov Commercial Institute, the forerunner of today's Kharkiv University of Economics.
In 1921-22 he worked in the statistical office of the southern bureau of the trade-union council in Kharkov, where he published his first study, of wages in industry. In 1922 he emigrated to the United States. His father had arrived some fifteen years earlier and taken the name Smith, which Kuznets kept as his middle name.
At Columbia University he took his bachelor's degree in 1923, his master's in 1924 and his doctorate in 1926 under Wesley Clair Mitchell. In 1927 he joined the National Bureau of Economic Research, where he worked until 1961. Commissioned by the US Department of Commerce, he produced the first official estimates of American national income, for 1929-32, published as a Senate document in 1934; the methods he developed for measuring national income and product became the basis of national accounting worldwide. He helped found the Conference on Research in Income and Wealth in 1936 and the International Association for Research in Income and Wealth in 1947.
He taught at the University of Pennsylvania from 1930 to 1954, at Johns Hopkins from 1954 to 1960 and at Harvard from 1960 or 1961 until his retirement in 1971. His studies of long-term growth gave economics the Kuznets swings, cycles of fifteen to twenty-five years, and the Kuznets curve, the hypothesis that inequality first rises and then falls as an economy develops. He advised the governments of Taiwan, Japan, India, South Korea and Israel on statistics and planning.
In 1971 he received the third Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences, for his empirically founded interpretation of economic growth. He died in Cambridge, Massachusetts, on 8 or 9 July 1985, sources differ, aged eighty-four.
"Studied and worked in Kharkov until 1922, then emigrated to the United States, where his father had settled some fifteen years earlier."
Migration storyTracing the roots — Pinsk, Minsk Governorate (now Belarus); schooled in Rovno and Kharkov
Born in Pinsk in the Russian Empire in 1901, he was educated in Rovno and Kharkov, studied at the Kharkov Commercial Institute and worked in Ukrainian labour statistics before emigrating to the United States in 1922.
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Pinsk, Minsk Governorate (now Belarus); schooled in Rovno and Kharkov. At the time, this region lay within the Russian Empire, which spanned from Poland to the Pacific.