Political Arithmetic: Simon Kuznets and the Empirical Tradition in Economics.

• Position: Bureau Books - Brief article - Book review

Political Arithmetic: Simon Kuznets and the Empirical Tradition in Economics, by Robert William Fogel, Enid M. Fogel, Mark Guglielmo, and Nathanial Grotte, is the most recent volume in the NBER's Series on Long-Term Factors in Economic Development. In this monograph, Fogel and his collaborators tell the story of economist Simon Kuznets and the founding of the National Bureau of Economic Research, along with the creation of the concept of Gross National Product (GNP), which enabled us to measure the performance of entire economies. The product of a lifetime of studying the workings of economies and...