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Fogel Robert , Fogel Enid , Guglielmo Mark , and Grotte Nathaniel . Political Arithmetic: Simon Kuznets and the Empirical Tradition in Economics . Chicago : University of Chicago Press , 2013. xiii + 148 pp. ISBN 13-978-0-226-25661-0 , $32.00 (cloth); 978-0-226-02072-3 , $30.00 (ebook).
Reviews
Robert Fogel is best known as an economic historian, one whose researches transformed the field of economic history and ultimately earned him the economics Nobel. In Political Arthimetic: Simon Kuznets and the Empirical Tradition in Economics, however, Fogel, along with co-authors Enid Fogel, Mark Guglielmo, and Nathaniel Grotte, pursue a rather different path--the intellectual history of economics in the twentieth century and the important role that Simon Kuznets played within that tradition.
The book's title, Political Arithmetic, takes us back to the origins of empirical economics in the work of Sir William Petty and others of the Baconian tradition, who attempted to put the emerging subject of political economy on an empirical footing. Even though their methods were crude by modern standards, and their data limited by the collection vagaries of the period, these scientists recognized that taking the measure of the world around them was essential for understanding what had be theorized about and for putting policy on solid footing. As Fogel's discussion reveals, Kuznets was very much Petty's intellectual heir.
Kuznets received the Nobel Prize in 1971--the third prize awarded in economics--for his contributions to our understanding of economic growth. His legacy is much broader than this, though, as Fogel and his co-authors bring out very nicely. Born in Russia in 1901, Kuznets emigrated to the United States in 1922 and completed his undergraduate and graduate education at Columbia University, earning his Ph.D. in 1926. His mentor at Columbia was Wesley Clair Mitchell, a pioneer of modern empirical analysis and a founder of the National...