On the same day that the New York Times published Bob Fogel's obituary, this book came in my mail. It is fitting that Bob's last published work is a short biography of his mentor, Simon Kuznets. Political Arithmetic is informed by a series of interviews with prominent economists conducted by Bob and Enid Fogel who had planned to publish a number of books based on them.

The book is about the life and times of Simon Kuznets, with the emphasis on “times.” A short Introduction, “The Amazing Twentieth Century,” presents as background Bob's concept of “technophysio evolution” in that period. Chapter 1 traces the rise of academic economics before World War I, and the growing involvement of academic economists in public policymaking during that war. The World War I experience made clear the need for systematic quantitative information on the economy. This demonstrated need was a key factor in the subsequent establishment of the privately funded National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER), whose founding is the subject of chapter 2. The NBER's initial research thrust was two pronged—business cycles and national income. There is mention in this chapter of the early work on national income measurement of Willford King and Oswald Knauth, but this reader wanted more on Kuznets' recruitment to this endeavor and his pioneering NBER work on national product and income in the 1920s.

In chapter 3, “The Emergence of National Income as a Tool of Economic Policy,” Kuznets comes on stage in two brief appearances. The first is a description of Kuznets' work in the early 1930s in establishing official measurement of national income at the United States Department of Commerce; the second, his critical role early in World War II in constructing a realistic assessment using national income data of the economy's wartime production potential. Both of these were achievements of enormous importance. Kuznets had to have been immensely proud that his pioneering work on national income and product was the foundation of a formal government enterprise, and that in the course of time this work played a central role in the nation's war effort. The economic advances cited in some of the Nobel awards of recent decades pale by comparison.

It is in the next three chapters that Kuznets comes center stage. Chapter 4, “The Use of National Income Accounting to Study Comparative Economic Growth,” focuses on the achievement for which Kuznets was in fact awarded the Nobel Prize; and chapters 5 and 6, on his research methodology and legacy. The ideal of comparative study of the experience of different nations had long been advocated by scholars of the British and German Historical Schools, but no common approach to comparison had ever been found. Kuznets filled this gap with the framework provided by national income and product accounts. In addition to his estimates for the United States, Kuznets initiated and guided the construction of historical income and product estimates for a number of developed countries, and promoted and advised on the development of comparable estimates for less-developed nations. Subsequently, he assembled the results of this body of research in a series of ten papers under the rubric, “Quantitative Aspects of the Economic Growth of Nations,” which he eventually expanded into his 1966 classic Modern Economic Growth: Rate, Structure, and Spread. In this work, Kuznets developed broad generalizations about modern economic growth based on time series and cross sectional evidence for a number of nations. The topics ranged over similarities and differences in rates of growth, shifts in the allocation of resources, trends in the distribution of income, and external economic relationships. Earlier scholars such as Colin Clark had generalized about a particular feature of economic growth, but Kuznets' work was by far the most comprehensive. This framework for the study of economic growth is today at the heart of international data compilations such as the World Bank's World Development Indicators, and Kuznets' approach to the analysis of these data has now become so commonplace that it is taken for granted in the economics literature, and his pioneering study rarely cited.

Chapter 4 details the evolution of this work, chapter 5 considers Kuznets distinctive (for economics) evidence-oriented methodology, and chapter 6, his legacy, concluding that “Kuznets' work on national income accounting and the creation of measures of GDP are among his most lasting and influential contributions” (p.113). To this one might reasonably add, “and setting the agenda for the study of economic growth.” A short chapter 7 concludes the volume with Bob's thoughts about “The Quarter Century Since the Death of Simon Kuznets.”

Bob Fogel was an outstanding scholar, and he and Enid were my personal friends. When Enid died in 2007, Bob lost his beloved wife and the coauthor with whom he planned to publish the fruits of their interview project. Plagued by ill-health in his later years and bereft of Enid, Bob, with his other collaborators (Mark Guglielmo and Nathaniel Grotte) labored to piece this volume together. Political Arithmetic is a tribute to Bob's dedication and the zeal of his coauthors. For those unfamiliar with Kuznets' work, this book will provide a useful start.