David Schwartzman (April 22, 1924 – March 28, 2019) was a Canadian-born American economist. David_Schwartzman

Education and career

Born in Montreal to a Canadian father and American mother, Schwartzman’s first public role was as a national youth organizer for the Co-operative Commonwealth Federation (CCF). Schwartzman received his BA from

McGill University McGill University (french: link=no, Université McGill) is an English-language public research university located in Montreal, Quebec, Canada. Founded in 1821 by royal charter granted by King George IV,Frost, Stanley Brice. ''McGill Univer ...

, Canada in 1945, and spent the 1945–1946 academic year studying under

Milton Friedman Milton Friedman (; July 31, 1912 – November 16, 2006) was an American economist and statistician who received the 1976 Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences for his research on consumption analysis, monetary history and theory and the ...

and

George Stigler George Joseph Stigler (; January 17, 1911 – December 1, 1991) was an American economist. He was the 1982 laureate in Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences and is considered a key leader of the Chicago school of economics. Early life and e ...

at the

University of Minnesota The University of Minnesota, formally the University of Minnesota, Twin Cities, (UMN Twin Cities, the U of M, or Minnesota) is a public land-grant research university in the Twin Cities of Minneapolis and Saint Paul, Minnesota, United States. ...

. He earned his PhD from

UC Berkeley The University of California, Berkeley (UC Berkeley, Berkeley, Cal, or California) is a public land-grant research university in Berkeley, California. Established in 1868 as the University of California, it is the state's first land-grant uni ...

, USA in 1953. He held many teaching positions in economics: Lecturer at McGill (1948–1951); Instructor at Columbia (1954–1958); Assistant Professor at

New York University New York University (NYU) is a private research university in New York City. Chartered in 1831 by the New York State Legislature, NYU was founded by a group of New Yorkers led by then- Secretary of the Treasury Albert Gallatin. In 1832, th ...

(1958–1960), and Professor at the New School for Social Research (1960–1964), where he attained emeritus status in 2002.

Contributions

Schwartzman made significant novel contributions to the discipline of Industrial Organization (IO). A standard textbook on IO has testified to his contribution in several places.Scherer, F. M. and David Ross. (1990). "Industrial Market Structure and Economic Performance." Third Edition. Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company, pp. 79, 105, 425, 663 His core contributions are in the areas Economic Concentration—Regionally and locally, Uncertainty and the Size of Firms, The Burden of Monopoly, Black Unemployment, Rate of Returns in the Pharmaceutical Industry, and the Decline in the Retail and Service Industry. We present some analyses of his contributions as reviewed by others in academic journals. According to Billy R. Dickson,Dickens, Billy R. (1997). Review of Black Unemployment. Review of Black Political Economy 25(3).Winter, pp. 91-94 Schwartzman thesis in his book on "Black Unemployment" is based on the microeconomic model of substitution. Here the notion is substitution of factor prices, namely the relative price changes from unskilled labor to skilled labor demand. This analysis was carried out with labor-saving technologies as an instrumental variable. Sam Peltzman has analyzed Schwartzman’s hypothesis that the return in the pharmaceutical industry was declining from better rates in the 1950s and 1960s.Peltzman, Sam. (1978). Review of Schwartzman’s Innovation in the pharmaceutical Industry Book. "Journal of Economic Literature," Vol. 16, No. 1 (March), 149-150. The underlying cause for the decline included mainly the increase in regulation through the 1962 Amendments to the Food, Drug and Cosmetics Act. Ramrattan and Szenberg analyzed Schwartzman’s analyses of trends in the Retail and Service industries (1969; 1971).Ramrattan, L. and M. Szenberg. (2016). "Revolution in Book Publishing." New York: Palgrave-Macmillan, p. 7. The study puts into perspective growth and decline in the book industries. Of importance was slow employment growth, which was a quarter of a percent annually from 1929 to 1958, and one percent from 1958 to 1963.

Some of His Works

*Schwartzman, David. (1997). ''Black Unemployment: part of unskilled unemployment''. Wesport, Conn.: Greenwood Press. *Schwartzman, David. (1988). ''Games of Chicken - Four Decades of U.S. Nuclear Policy.'' New York: Praeger Publishers, 248 pages. . *Schwartzman, David. (1976). ''Innovation in the Pharmaceutical Industry''. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press. *Schwartzman, David, (1971). ''The Decline of Service in Retail Trade: An Analysis of the Growth of Sales per Man-Hour, 1919–1963''. Pullman, WA: Washington State University Press. *Schwartzman, David and Joan Bodoff, (1971). "Concentration in Regional and Local Industries," ''Southern Economic Journal'', Vol. 37 (January), pp. 343–348. *Schwartzman, David. (1969). ''Production and Productivity in the Service Industries,'' in Victor R. Fuchs, ed. Studies in Income and Wealth, ''NBER Conference on Research in Income and Wealth'', 34, 201-230. *Schwartzman, David. (1963). "Uncertainty and the Size of Firms," ''Economica'', Vol 30 (August), pp. 287–269. *Schwartzman, David. (1960). "The Burden of Monopoly," ''Journal of Political Economy'', vol. 33 (June), pp. 627–630.

References

{{DEFAULTSORT:Schwartzman, David 1924 births Canadian economists McGill University alumni 2019 deaths 20th-century American economists 20th-century American male writers 20th-century American non-fiction writers 21st-century American economists 21st-century American male writers 21st-century American non-fiction writers American economics writers American male non-fiction writers American political writers Jewish American social scientists Jewish American writers National Bureau of Economic Research Canadian emigrants to the United States 21st-century American Jews