Jewish Economies (Volume 2): Development and Migration in America and Beyond: Comparative Perspectives on Jewish Migration)

297 Pages·2012·2.43 MB·English

by  Simon Kuznets

Copyright © 2012 by Transaction Publishers, New Brunswick, New
Jersey.
All rights reserved under International and Pan-American
Copyright Conventions. No part of this book may be reproduced
or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechani-
cal, including photocopy, recording, or any information storage
and retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the
publisher. All inquiries should be addressed to Transaction Publish-
ers, Rutgers—The State University of New Jersey, 35 Berrue Circle,
Piscataway, New Jersey 08854-8042. www.transactionpub.com
This book is printed on acid-free paper that meets the American Nation-
al Standard for Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials.
Library of Congress Catalog Number: 2010052449
ISBN: 978-1-4128-4270-9
Printed in the United States of America
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Kuznets, Simon, 1901-1985.
Jewish economies : development and migration in America and
beyond / Simon Kuznets ; [editors] E. Glen Weyl & Stephanie Lo.
v. ; cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
Contents: v. 1. Economic structure and growth of Euro-American
Jewry.
ISBN 978-1-4128-4211-2
1. Jews—Economic conditions. 2. Jews—Europe—Economic con-
ditions. 3. Jews—United States—Economic conditions. I. Weyl,
E. Glen (Eric Glen), 1985- II. Lo, Stephanie. III. Title.
DS140.5.K89 2011
′
330.9730089924—dc22 2010052449
Contents
Acknowledgments vii
Preface ix
Stephanie Lo
Introduction: Simon Kuznets, Cautious Empiricist of
the Eastern European Jewish Diaspora xv
E. Glen Weyl
1. Immigration and the Foreign Born 1
Simon Kuznets (with Ernest Rubin)
2. Israel’s Economic Development 103
Simon Kuznets
3. Immigration of Russian Jews to the United States:
Background and Structure 143
Simon Kuznets
Index 233

A cknowledgments
Help from many people was crucial in making this compilation
possible.
We gratefully acknowledge Paul Kuznets and Judith Stein. Th eir
unending support, both through personal interviews and their permis-
sion to access and use their father’s papers, was pivotal throughout
the entire process.
E . Glen Weyl would like to thank Olga Litvak, whose class HIS382
“Th e Eastern European Jewish Diaspora in Comparative Perspective:
Israel, America and the USSR in the Twentieth Century” in the spring
of 2007 fi rst stoked this work.
We appreciate the helpful comments of Barry and Carmel Chiswick,
Ben Friedman, Mark Guglielmo, Levis Kochin, Vladimir Moskovin,
Peter Temin, and seminar participants at Duke University, particularly
Malachi Hacohen and Roy Weintraub. We are especially grateful for
the thorough discussion of our work provided by Vibha Kapuria-
Foreman, and the fi nancial support of the History of Economics
Society that made it possible for Weyl to attend the meeting where
this discussion was given.
W e also benefi ted from the fi nancial support of the Milton Fund,
which, among other things, made possible the excellent research as-
sistance of Yani Petrov and Rui Wang. Critical institutional support
for this work came from the creative environment fostered by the
Harvard Society of Fellows, without which it is unlikely that we would
have pursued this interdisciplinary project.
Permissions
Paul Kuznets and Judith Stein have kindly provided permissions
to publish all of the previously undistributed works that appear in
this compilation.
W e would also like to give full credit to all the publishers who made
this work possible. All permissions are nonexclusive.
vii
Jewish Economies
We thank the National Bureau of Economic Research and, in par-
ticular, Claudia Goldin and James Poterba, for allowing us to edit and
republish I mmigration and the Foreign Born . Th e piece, written by
Kuznets in conjunction with Ernest Rubin, was previously published
as NBER Occasional Paper 46 in 1954, pp. 1–107.
Copyright, 1954, by National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc.
261 Madison Avenue, New York 16, NY
All Rights Reserved.
W e are grateful to the editor of the journal R ivoon L’Calcala
( Economic Quarterly: Th e Journal of the Israeli Economic Associa-
tion ) and the board at the Israeli Economic Association for their
permission to translate and publish “Israel’s Economic Develop-
ment,” which appeared in their journal in Hebrew in 1973 (vol. 20)
on pp. 189–209.
W e also appreciate the permissions from the Charles Warren Center
at Harvard University, which allowed us to republish “Immigration of
Russian Jews to the United States.” Th is work originally appeared in
Perspectives in American History (vol. IX—1975), edited by D. Fleming
and B. Bailyn, pp. 35–124.
W e would also like to give credit to Naftali Greenwood, who did a
spectacular job providing a professional translation and interpretation
of “Israel’s Economic Development” from Hebrew to English.
viii
Preface
Stephanie Lo
Simon Smith Kuznets was an economist known for his analytic
rigor, having won the 1971 Nobel Prize “for his empirically founded
interpretation of economic growth that has led to new and deepened
insight into the economic and social structure and process of develop-
ment.” While he remains best known for his development of national
income accounts, in fact, Kuznets had interests encompassing a broad
range of topics (he has written thirty-one books and over two hundred
papers) involving more general work on developmental economics.
While some of Kuznets’s work is well known to the economics com-
munity, much less is known about his studies on the economic history
of Jews broadly, which included in-depth work on immigration. In this
work, we reveal a lesser known side of Kuznets: the Eastern European
Jewish immigrant, who persistently pursued the topic of Jewish his-
tory, yet hesitated to make his work more generally known due to his
personal interest in the subject and therefore, by his reasoning, his
bias. In doing so, we found many unpublished or hard-to-fi nd works
by Kuznets—some not previously available in English and most not
formerly available to the public—which we hope to make widely
available by publishing here. Th ere are many facets of value to these
pioneering works on Jewish immigration and economic structure; not
only are the data and rigorous analyses valuable on their own, but they
also work together to give the readers insight into the personality and
intellect of the founder of modern empirical economics.
Th is compilation, Jewish Economies: Development and Migration
in America and Beyond, consists of two volumes, entitled “Economic
Structure and Growth of Euro-American Jewry” and “Comparative
Jewish Migration and Economy.”
Th e fi rst volume starts with an introduction to this work, written
by my colleague, E. Glen Weyl, which outlines many of the broader
ix