GINZBERG, ELI

GINZBERG, ELI (1911–2002), U.S. economist and social planner. Ginzberg was born in New York City, the son of rabbinic   scholar louis ginzberg . He studied economics at Columbia University and in 1935 was appointed to the Columbia School of Business, where he was A. Barton Hepburn Professor of Economics until 1979. In addition to his teaching duties, Ginzberg was an adviser to several U.S. presidents, from Franklin D. Roosevelt through jimmy carter . He was named director of the Eisenhower Center for the Conservation of Human Resources, when it was established in 1950. Under his guidance the Center was responsible for pioneering research efforts in employment and health policy. He also served with the United States War Department (1942–44 and 1946–48), the Surgeon General's Office, the White House Conference on Children and Youth (1959–63), and the National Manpower Council, of which he became chairman in 1962. His activities as a consultant, which were widely sought, embraced the United States Departments of State, Defense, Labor, and Health, Education and Welfare, the Hoover Commission, and the National Advisory Mental Health Council. From 1953 to 1959 he was a governor of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. In 1978, on the verge of retirement from Columbia, Ginzberg accepted an appointment to direct the Revson Fellows Program on the Future of the City of New York at Columbia. For the next 20 years he oversaw the selection of 240 Revson Fellows and guided them into positions of leadership. A specialist in labor economics, Ginzberg was particularly interested in problems of manpower utilization and economic growth, especially as they affected underdeveloped countries and minority groups. He was a leading expert on the economic aspects of African-American inequality in the United States, and he frequently traveled abroad in an advisory capacity to the governments of developing nations, especially Israel. Among his more than 100 publications are The House of Adam Smith (1934), Grass on the Slag Heaps: The Story of the Welsh Miners (1942), Agenda for American Jews (1950), The Potential (1956), Manpower Utilization in Israel (1962), The Great Society: Lessons for the Future (1974), Beyond Human Scale: The Large Corporation at Risk (1985), My Brother's Keeper: Reflections on Jews, Social Science & Public Policy (1989), The Medical Triangle: Physicians, Politicians, and the Public (1992), and Tomorrow's Hospital: A Look to the Twenty-First Century (1998). He edited a wide series of studies for the Columbia Conservation of Human Resources Department, including The Uneducated (1953), Life Styles of Educated Women (1966), and Manpower Strategy for the Metropolis (1968). His biography of his father, Keeper of the Law, was published in 1966. -BIBLIOGRAPHY: Current Biography Yearbook, 1966 (1967), 126–9. ADD. BIBLIOGRAPHY: I. Horowitz (ed.), Eli Ginzberg: The Economist as a Public Intellectual (2002). (Mark Perlman / Ruth Beloff (2nd ed.)