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BEFORE NBER: WARREN NUTTER’S SOVIET RESEARCH AT THE CIA

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  08 October 2024

Daniel Kuehn
Daniel Kuehn*
Affiliation:
Daniel Kuehn: Principal Research Associate, the Urban Institute; and adjunct professor, George Washington University.
*
Email: [email protected]
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Abstract

Warren Nutter’s work as director of the National Bureau of Economic Research’s (NBER) Soviet growth project is his best-known contribution to economics and public affairs. Many histories of Sovietology note the oddity of Nutter’s selection as project director, given his apparent lack of prior experience studying the Soviet Union. This paper provides new context for Nutter’s selection to lead the NBER effort. From 1951 to 1952 Nutter was the acting chief of the Economic Capabilities Branch of the CIA’s Office of Research and Reports (ORR), and chairman of the Economic Analysis Subcommittee of the interagency Economic Intelligence Committee. In this capacity he managed at least three major research efforts, including an input-output analysis of the Soviet Union and contributions to two national intelligence estimates. Nutter may have been proposed as director of the NBER project by Robert Amory, the Deputy Director of Intelligence, in 1953. Nutter’s research for the CIA cultivated new analytic capacities for the agency and provided a foundation for his own work on the Soviet Union.

Type
Article
Information
Journal of the History of Economic Thought , First View , pp. 1 - 25
Copyright
© The Author(s), 2024. Published by Cambridge University Press on behalf of History of Economics Society

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Footnotes

This paper benefited from conversations with Irwin Collier, V. L. Elliott, and John H. Moore, and from comments on earlier drafts by Pedro Duarte, Max Ehrenfreund, Jennifer Juhn, Mary Morgan, Roy Weintraub, and three anonymous reviewers. This paper could not have been written without documents made available by the CIA. All CIA documents reported here are publicly available through the CIA’s FOIA Reading Room.

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