Simon Kuznets and the Empirical Tradition in Economics

在33岁生日之前，西蒙·库兹涅茨将logistic曲线和Gompertz曲线引入经济分析，定义了经济增长研究中的关键问题，并为现在标准的价格、就业和产出的季节性调整奠定了基础。在接下来的15年里，他致力于发展国民收入账户，并将其应用于政府的实际问题。作为战时生产委员会的首席统计员，他证明了国民收入法在制定战时和民用生产目标方面的优越性。在他职业生涯的平衡中，库兹涅茨专注于发展基于经验的现代经济增长理论，并因此获得诺贝尔奖。罗伯特·福格尔教授和伊尼德·福格尔院长正在调查西蒙·s·库兹涅茨的工作，目的不仅是评估他对经济学的贡献，而且还展示了库兹涅茨的工作如何帮助经济学在20世纪从道德哲学的一个分支转变为一门学科，为在政府和企业中制定和实施经济政策的个人提供了重要的份额。他们正在研究库兹涅茨对经济知识的实质性贡献和他的科学方法。这些方法和实质性的工作一样，是经济学转型的一个主要因素，然而，它们现在只被相对有限的实证研究人员所知。

Before his 33rd birthday, Simon Kuznets introduced the logistic and Gompertz curves to economic analysis, defined the key issues in the study of economic growth, and laid the basis for the now standard seasonal adjustments for prices, employment, and output. His next 15 years were devoted to the development of national income accounts and their application to practical problems of government. As chief statistician of the War Production Board, he demonstrated the superiority of the national income approach in establishing wartime and civilian production targets. During the balance on his career, Kuznets concentrated on developing an empirically based theory of modern economic growth, for which he was awarded the Nobel Prize. Professor Robert Fogel and Dean Enid Fogel are investigating the work of Simon S. Kuznets with the objective not only of assessing his contributions to economics, but also of showing how Kuznets' work helped to transform economics during the twentieth century from a branch of moral philosophy to a discipline that provides an important share of the individuals who make and implement economic policy in the government and in business. They are examining both Kuznets' substantive contribution to economic knowledge and his scientific methods. These methods, as much as the substantive work, are a major factor in the transformation of economics, yet they are now known only to a relatively limited circle of empirical investigators.