While trawling the internet for a ca. 1920 photo of Edwin Francis Gay for another post (coming attraction), I found the following history of the Department of Commerce’s publication “Survey of Current Business” commissioned for the occasion of the centenary celebration of its founding. We encounter Herbert Hoover, Wesley Clair Mitchell, Edwin Francis Gay, and Simon Kuznets on page one of the history…
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The Origins of
the Survey of Current Business:
A Window on the Evolution of Economic Policy, Research, and Statistics
By Andrew D. Reamer
For decades, the Survey of Current Business, the flagship monthly publication of the Bureau of Economic Analysis (BEA), has provided macro-, industry, international, and regional economists with data, analysis, and methodological research concerning the national economic accounts. This was not always so.
The Survey was founded in July 1921 as Department of Commerce (DOC) Secretary Herbert Hoover’s primary tool to promote macroeconomic stabilization. Specifically, the Survey published current, detailed industry-specific data from hundreds of public and private secondary sources so businesses might make better operational and investment decisions. One decade and a Great Depression later, the extensive statistical clearinghouse feeding the Survey became the foundation for Simon Kuznets’ famed study of national income and the subsequent development of national economic accounting.
The Survey’s creation and its later repurposing were the results of efforts by economists Edwin Gay and Wesley Mitchell, largely through a series of collaborations with Hoover between 1921 and 1933. As members of Hoover’s Joint Census Advisory Committee, Gay and Mitchell recommended the Survey’s development, modeled on the statistical clearinghouse they created to guide federal economic planning in the First World War. As founding leaders of the National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER), they guided path-setting studies of national income and business cycles, several commissioned by Hoover; trained and hired Kuznets, who contributed to several NBER studies, including one for Hoover; and detailed Kuznets to the DOC to prepare the groundbreaking national income report.
This article begins by describing the Survey’s role in economic stabilization policy in the 1920s and the development of national economic accounting in the 1930s. The succeeding sections unpack this story by delving into how the Survey came to play these successive roles, particularly through Gay, Mitchell, and Hoover’s efforts. …
Source: From “Chronicling 100 Years of the U.S. Economy,” Survey of Current Business Vol. 100, No. 10 (October 2020)
Links to archived versions of the full article: htm; pdf.
Image Source: Secretary of Commerce Herbert Hoover, ca.1921. From the blog of the Herbert Hoover Presidential Library and Museum.