Simon Kuznets

The concept of Gross Domestic Product is ubiquitous in the modern world... this is how we tell which countries are superior! In all seriousness, the GDP is the sum of all domestic goods produced in a country, and it is used to measure each nation's economic capacity. (China is closing in. Watch out, USA!)

In any case, the concept of GDP was first coined by Simon Kuznets, a Russian-born Jew who emigrated to the US in 1922. Twelve years later, in the middle of the Great Depression, Congress wanted to measure how much money there actually was in the country. So the 33-year-old Kuznets was commissioned to determine just that, and the GDP was born.

Kuznets won the Economic Nobel in 1971, but it wasn't just for the creation of the GDP. The Kuznets Curve is an important concept in economics. It shows the relation between income per capita and economic inequality:

Watch out, USA...

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