Simon Kuznets was a professor of economics at the University of Pennsylvania, Johns Hopkins University and Harvard, and the President of the American Economic Association in 1954. This economist is probably best known for his studies of the national i ncome and its many components. Beginning in the 1930's, Kuznets was the first to systematically compute the U.S. national income all the way back to 1869. The catagories he used were as follows: industry, final product, use, and distribution of income between rich and poor. He later, along with the U.S. Department of Commerce, helped to standardize the measure of GNP (Gross National Product). Interestingly, he was a big advocate of calculating unpaid housework into the GNP and was refused by the U. S. Department of Commerce (which to this day refuses to include this in its calculations). His work was invaluable to Keynes work and econometrics.

Kuznets received the Nobel Prize in 1971 for his measurment in national income accounting and for his empirical work on economic growth...where he defined a period of "modern economic growth" which began in Northwestern Europe in the later eighteen th century and spread south and east, eventually reaching Russia and Japan by the end of the nineteenth century. He also studied the effects of economic growth on income distribution...he found that in poor countries, economic growth increased the income disparity between rich and poor people and the oppisite effect in wealthy countries.

Works by Simon Kuznets:

Economic Growth of Nations: Total Output and Production Structure
Economic Growth and Structure: Selected Essays
Income From Independent Professional Practice (With Milton Friedman)
Modern Economic Growth: Rate, Structure, and Spread
National Income, 1929-1932
National Income and Capital Formation, 1919-1935
National Product Since 1869
Shares of Upper Income Groups in Income and Savings