Early Years, Education, and Professional Career
Hansen was born to Danish immigrant parents at Viborg, South Dakota on the South Dakota frontier. After an English degree at Yankton College, he took his PhD in economics at the University of Wisconsin-Madison in 1918. He worked with institutionalists John R. Commons and Richard T. Ely, but did not adopt their approach. After his doctorate, Hansen taught at Brown University until his appointment at the University of Minnesota in 1923, where he specialized in business cycles. He consulted frequently in Washington and helped Edwin E. Witte to help draft the Social Security Act of 1935. In 1937 Hansen was appointed Lucius N. Littauer Professor of Political Economy at Harvard University.
Read more about this topic: Alvin Hansen
Famous quotes containing the words early, professional and/or career:
“... goodness is of a modest nature, easily discouraged, and when much elbowed in early life by unabashed vices, is apt to retire into extreme privacy, so that it is more easily believed in by those who construct a selfish old gentleman theoretically, than by those who form the narrower judgments based on his personal acquaintance.”
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“Smoking ... is downright dangerous. Most people who smoke will eventually contract a fatal disease and die. But they don’t brag about it, do they? Most people who ski, play professional football or drive race cars, will not die—at least not in the act—and yet they are the ones with the glamorous images, the expensive equipment and the mythic proportions. Why this should be I cannot say, unless it is simply that the average American does not know a daredevil when he sees one.”
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