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:
“Long before I wrote stories, I listened for stories. Listening for them is something more acute than listening to them. I suppose it’s an early form of participation in what goes on. Listening children know stories are there. When their elders sit and begin, children are just waiting and hoping for one to come out, like a mouse from its hole.”
—Eudora Welty (b. 1909)
“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.”
—Fran Lebowitz (b. 1950)
“Work-family conflicts—the trade-offs of your money or your life, your job or your child—would not be forced upon women with such sanguine disregard if men experienced the same career stalls caused by the-buck-stops-here responsibility for children.”
—Letty Cottin Pogrebin (20th century)