DownloadThe Portobello Bookshop Gift Guide 2024

Political Arithmetic

Simon Kuznets and the Empirical Tradition in Economics

Robert William Fogel author Enid M Fogel author Mark Guglielmo author Nathaniel Grotte author

Format:Hardback

Publisher:The University of Chicago Press

Published:3rd May '13

Currently unavailable, and unfortunately no date known when it will be back

Political Arithmetic cover

We take for granted today that the assessments, measurements, and forecasts of economists are crucial to the decision-making of governments and businesses alike. But less than a century ago that wasn't the case - economists simply didn't have the necessary information or statistical tools to understand the ever more complicated modern economy. With "Political Arithmetic", Nobel Prize - winning economist Robert William Fogel and his collaborators tell the story of economist Simon Kuznets, the founding of the National Bureau of Economic Research, and the creation of the concept of GNP, which for the first time enabled us to measure the performance of entire economies. The book weaves together the many strands of political and economic thought and historical pressures that together created the demand for more detailed economic thinking - Progressive-era hopes for activist government, the production demands of World War I, Herbert Hoover's interest in business cycles as President Harding's commerce secretary, and the catastrophic economic failures of the Great Depression - and shows how, through trial and error, measurements, and analysis, economists such as Kuznets rose to the occasion and in the process built a discipline whose knowledge could be put to practical use in everyday decision-making. The product of a lifetime of studying the workings of economies and skillfully employing the tools of economics, "Political Arithmetic" is simultaneously a history of a key period of economic thought and a testament to the power of applied ideas.

"It all adds up! Political Arithmetic captures a great intellectual pioneer at work and shows how he helped make modern economics a tool for transforming not only mankind's environment but mankind itself." (Sylvia Nasar, author of Grand Pursuit: The Story of Economic Genius and A Beautiful Mind)"

ISBN: 9780226256610

Dimensions: 23mm x 16mm x 2mm

Weight: 397g

168 pages