He invented the number governments use to measure national success, then warned them not to trust it.
In 1934, Simon Kuznets presented the United States Congress with the first comprehensive estimate of American national income. The report, covering the years 1929 to 1932, gave the federal government something it had never possessed, a single number representing the economic output of the entire country.1
Kuznets had been born in Pinsk, in what is now Belarus, in 1901. He emigrated to the United States in 1922, earned three degrees from Columbia University by 1926, and joined the National Bureau of Economic Research in 1927, where he began the work on national income accounting that would define his career.2
During World War II, Kuznets served as associate director of the Bureau of Planning and Statistics at the War Production Board, where his measures of national output became essential tools for wartime planning. The concept he had standardized, gross national product, allowed the government to assess the country’s capacity to produce military materiel while maintaining civilian consumption.3
Kuznets broke with the U.S. Department of Commerce in the late 1940s over how GNP should be used. He argued that the measure should include the value of unpaid housework, because domestic labor was a genuine component of economic production. The department refused.4 In his later work, Kuznets warned explicitly against using national income as a measure of welfare, writing that the welfare of a nation can scarcely be inferred from a measurement of national income.5
Kuznets received the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences in 1971, cited for his empirically founded interpretation of economic growth. He taught at the University of Pennsylvania, Johns Hopkins, and Harvard over a career spanning four decades. He died in Cambridge, Massachusetts, in 1985, having built the metric by which nations would judge themselves, and having spent much of his later career arguing that they were using it wrong.6