Zvi Griliches as a qualified humanitarian: His thoughts on quantifying technological change and productivity

Zvi Griliches (ZG), one of the greatest empirical economics researchers of the 20th century on technology, was displaced from his place of birth and placed in a German concentration camp during the second World War (WW). He later emigrated to Israel and then the United States. His expertise was the measurement of agricultural and industrial technology and the quantification of technical change. We question whether ZG would have followed this same path, had he not been part of such a horrific displacement. We conclude that this experience appears to have made ZG more of a humanitarian-a thesis untested before now; but at the same time, he was motivated to not draw overly optimistic conclusions about how fast growth could take place. Therefore, he was always extremely aware of hidden inconsistencies in the data or the challenges of economic measurements. © 2004 Board of Trustees of the University of Illinois. All rights reserved