Letters

摘要

Economists helped shape American policy and public attitudes well before the 1950s ("The numbers guys", August 31st). This is exemplified by the rise of national-income accounting in the late 1920s, the influx of economists into Franklin Roosevelt's wartime government, the Employment Act of 1946, which created the Council of Economic Advisers, the Committee for Economic Development's influential policy books in the 1940s, and the sharp rise in economics phds in the late 1940s. Before that, John Commons, the president of the American Economic Association, urged colleagues to assist federal agencies during the first world war. The National Bureau of Economic Research, founded in 1920, embarked on the first systematic efforts to gauge national income and study business cycles.