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 Bureau of Economic Research (NBER), from which much of the earliest empirical work in economics in the United States emanated.

Over the course of his career, Kuznets held academic appointments at the University of Pennsylvania, Johns Hopkins, and Harvard. However, he was far from the isolated academic. His career included stints at the U.S. Department of Commerce during the depression and with the Bureau of Planning and Statistics during World War II, as well as service on a range of other governmental and international agency commissions, and consultancies with governments around the globe. No less important was Kuznets’s work as an institution builder; he was a major national and international force in bringing together groups of scholars and policy makers to examine and construct data related to fundamental problems related to processes of economic growth and development.

Historians of economics and of the social sciences generally have been rather slow in coming to Kuznets as a subject of analysis. The recent efforts of Glen Weyl to bring to publication Kuznets’s previously unpublished work on the economic history of the Jews ^{Footnote 1} are accompanied by his excellent introductory essay setting Kuznets’s work against the backdrop of his larger body of scholarship. However, Kuznets’s contributions to economics, although frequently referenced as pieces of larger historical narratives, have never been made the subject of serious analysis. The present volume begins to fill this lacuna—although, at 105 pages of text, it does not pretend to do so in exhaustive fashion. Instead, it locates the man and his work in the political, economic, and professional contexts of the middle third of the twentieth century and provides the reader with an overview of Kuznets’s contributions and how they fit within these contexts.

The book opens with two chapters that describe the evolution of economics in the United States during the nineteenth century and the first third of the twentieth, with the second focusing in particular on the empirical turn of the latter period and furtherance of this that came with the founding of the NBER. Kuznets enters the story, at last but only sporadically, in the third chapter, which examines the emergence of national income accounting and its use as a tool for economic policy—a process that began in force when, in 1933, Congress ordered the Department of Commerce to prepare national accounts and Kuznets was drafted to do the heavy lifting. The focus on Kuznets intensifies with the fourth chapter, which examines how national income accounts were used in the comparative analysis of economic growth during the post-World War II period, and is carried through into subsequent chapters focusing on Kuznets’s contributions, methods, and legacy.

Kuznets, for his part, was an economic optimist and saw the Depression as an outlier—a point of view that was by no means widely shared at the time. This led him to champion the use of national income accounts as the basis for growth studies that, he hoped, would provide insights that could serve as the foundation for a better understanding of macroeconomic performance and the larger long-term economic growth process. The result was a lengthy series of monographs published as special issues of the journal Economic Development and Cultural Change—studies that, in a sense, culminated in Kuznets’s classic book, Modern Economic Growth, published in 1966, which wove together the insights gleaned from his statistical studies and his introspective theorizing about the processes of economic growth.

The great irony here, as the authors point out, is that this work, the totality of which earned Kuznets his Nobel, was rejected for support by the NBER when Kuznets orginally proposed it in the mid-1940s. Instead, the project was carried out under the auspices of the Social Science Research Council and funded by the Rockefeller Foundation. This is but one of the many indicators in the last half of the book that point to the uneasy place of Kuznets in the profession and in the history of economics. There is no settled view on whether Kuznets was, in fact, an economic theorist—let alone one of the first order. He was, by turns, economic historian, statistician, data analyst, and economic interpreter. His highly inductive approach to theorizing often smacks more of the approach associated with the institutionalism of the first half of the century than the so-called neoclassical economics that increasingly came to dominate the profession in the post-World War II era. However, he is indisputably the father of modern economic growth theory, even if he eschewed the mathematical formulations of a Robert Solow or a Robert Lucas in favor of numerical examples. In an era when economics was increasingly becoming a mathematical modeling science, Kuznets preferred the intuitive argument that, even in its great sophistication, would be intelligible to a wide audience.

Those looking for a deep and richly contextualized history of the development of national income accounting, the empirical tradition in economics, or Kuznets’s contributions to economic analysis will not find it in this slim volume. What Fogel and his co-authors have given us, instead, is a wonderfully written snapshot of the man and his work, one that is suggestive of the important work that remains to be done in understanding this important slice of the history of modern economics and that begins the process of giving Kuznets his historical due.