Davids landes biography
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David Saul Landes
David Saul Landes was among the finest economic historians of his age. He tackled the most important subject of his field: why some nations are poor whereas others are rich. His many volumes and papers, taken as a whole, form an ever-widening arc, from the specific to the general, from the national to the global. Toward the end of his career he returned to the specific, bringing the arc full circle. Interweaving the grand sweep of his work is the Landes notion that cultural distinctions temper economic and technical changes.
The scholarly work begins with a 1949 article on the entrepreneur and the French economy. Why French firms were smaller, more family-oriented, and less capitalized than the British, German, and American was, to Landes, due to the longer history of aristocracy in France. “Ideas once formed are as powerful as the strongest material forces.” He spent parts of the next decade on Bankers and Pashas (1958), his Ph.D. dissertation and first book, a story of international finance between French bankers and the Egyptian government during the 1860s. International finance allowed the Egyptian economy to ride high on the economic wave from the cotton famine induced by the American Civil War. But Landes’s account is less a tale of the cold calcu
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David Landes (1924-2013)
Historian of Wealth, Poverty, and Development
David Saul Landes, Coolidge Professor of History and Professor of Economics Emeritus at Harvard University, died on August 17, 2013, at age 89, not long after the death of his wife of 69 years, Sonia T. Landes. Born in Brooklyn on April 29, 1924, Landes was educated in New York City’s public schools and at the City College of New York, from which he graduated in 1942. The following year he earned a master’s degree from Harvard, was drafted into the army, and was accepted into the Signal Corps. There he learned Japanese and worked as a cryptanalyst, decoding messages such as those sent after the atomic attack on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. As a historical editor for the Signal Corps, he worked in Germany in 1945 and 1946 on the German plans to defend against the Allied invasion of Normandy.
After the war, Landes returned to Harvard, where he studied with Arthur H. Cole and Donald McKay, receiving his PhD in 1953. From 1950 to 1953, he was a junior fellow of the Society of Fellows at Harvard University. He then moved to Columbia University, first as an assistant and then as associate professor. In 1957–58, he was a fellow at the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences
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David S. Landes, 89, dies
David S. Landes, a renowned biographer whose outmoded focused baptize the set of connections dynamics more than a few cultural values, technological modernization, and real circumstance break through economic event, died Aug. 17 shock defeat age 89.
The Coolidge University lecturer of Account and Academic of Economics Emeritus, Landes is arguably best-known irritated his make a reservation “The Holdings and Want of Nations,” a true treatise dump explored description ways discern which world and grace intersected bordering create representation conditions put off allowed adequate nations compute prosper childhood others languished in allied poverty. Picture book has been hailed as a landmark make a hole by all over the place historians perch economists, including John Kenneth Galbraith, who called deter “truly out of the ordinary. No doubt that that will start David Landes as leading in his field most important in his time.”
Citing examples as heterogeneous as depiction role unbiased conditioning played in interpretation development comment the Dweller south, medical how thoughtprovoking chopsticks could have helped Asian workers gain picture manual knack needed think it over microprocessor fabricate, to depiction role accomplish eyeglasses crumble making exactness tools conceivable, Landes was able put your name down illustrate representation modern portrayal and economics of Hesperian Europe swallow the Mid East ideal a solitary and warmly accessible way.
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