Elizabeth Waterman Gilboy

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Elizabeth Waterman Gilboy
Born	Elizabeth Lane Waterman (1903-09-24)September 24, 1903 Boston, Massachusetts, U.S.
💀Died	October 9, 1973(1973-10-09) (aged 70) Waltham, Massachusetts, U.S.October 9, 1973(1973-10-09) (aged 70)
💼 Occupation

Elizabeth Waterman Gilboy (24 September 1903 – 9 October 1973) was an American economist and economic historian at Harvard University. Her studies of wages in eighteenth-century England and her 1932 essay "Demand as a Factor in the Industrial Revolution" were contributions to the debate over living standards during the Industrial Revolution. In the 1930s she published early empirical studies of demand and consumer expenditure and disputed John Maynard Keynes's treatment of the propensity to consume. From 1950 she was associate director of Wassily Leontief's Harvard Economic Research Project, the centre for input–output analysis.

Early life and education

Elizabeth Lane Waterman was born in Boston on 24 September 1903, the daughter of Arthur John and Amy (Lane) Waterman. She attended the Boston Girls' Latin School, where she studied English, Greek, Latin, mathematics and physics. She graduated from Barnard College in 1924 with honors in economics and sociology and was elected to Phi Beta Kappa.

She received an AM from Radcliffe College in 1925 and began doctoral research on wages in eighteenth-century England under the economic historian Edwin Francis Gay. A Whitney Travelling Fellowship took her to England in 1926–28 to collect data, and during that time she was registered as a graduate student at the London School of Economics. In January 1926 she was one of nine Radcliffe graduate students who petitioned Allyn Young, chairman of Harvard's economics department, for "the privilege of regular attendance" at the department's graduate "Economics Seminary". She received her PhD from Radcliffe in 1929 with a dissertation titled "Wages and Standards of Living of English Labor, 1700–1790".

Career

Gilboy was an instructor in economics at Wellesley College in 1928–29. At Harvard she was secretary of the Committee on Research in the Social Sciences in 1929–30 and its executive secretary from 1930 to 1941, and from 1930 to 1941 she was also a graduate adviser at Radcliffe. She also worked as a researcher with the Harvard University Committee on Economic Research. Her biographer J. J. Thomas notes that her work at Harvard, where she was known as "Mrs Gilboy", was mainly administrative, while at Radcliffe she taught and advised as "Dr Gilboy".

During the Second World War she was a member of the Economic Division of the Office of Strategic Services in 1942–43. She was associate director of the Harvard Economic Research Project from 1950 and its acting director in 1964–65, and she was a consultant to the Bureau of Labor Statistics from 1960 to 1964.

Research

Wages and the Industrial Revolution

Gilboy's research on English wages addressed the dispute between writers such as Sidney and Beatrice Webb, who regarded the eighteenth century as a "golden age" for labourers, and J. L. and Barbara Hammond, who described a progressive degradation of working-class living standards. Drawing on wage assessments by justices of the peace in Gloucestershire, Kent and Middlesex, the account books of the Thornborough estate in Yorkshire, and Beveridge's wheat-price data, she found a more varied pattern than either side had suggested: low and largely unchanging wages in Gloucestershire, and high and rising wages in Yorkshire. Her dissertation research was published as Wages in Eighteenth Century England (Harvard University Press, 1934). A 1936 study using improved price indices found falling real wages in London but confirmed rising real wages in the north of England.

Her essay "Demand as a Factor in the Industrial Revolution", contributed to a 1932 volume by former students of Edwin Gay, argued that changes in consumption standards, population growth, social mobility and rising real incomes "provided a stimulus to the expansion of industry that must not be underestimated". The economic historian R. M. Hartwell later called it "an important and neglected essay, partly, no doubt, because of the rarity of the volume in which it is published". Thomas judges her contributions to the Industrial Revolution debate the most lasting of her work.

Demand studies

In a series of articles in the Quarterly Journal of Economics she examined how far statistically derived demand curves corresponded to the static demand curve of Marshallian theory, compared the methods of Wassily Leontief and Henry Schultz for deriving them, and argued for estimating expenditure–income functions instead. Her empirical studies estimated demand from the expenditures of 50 Harvard economists, from monthly data on milk and butter in Boston for 1899–1926, and from annual data on coffee and tea in the United States for 1850–1930. She cautioned that "there should be no attempt to force empirical results into a neat theoretical structure, no matter how beautifully it may lend itself to mathematical development".

Consumption and the propensity to consume

Her finding that constant-elasticity functions fitted expenditure data poorly for higher-income households led her into an exchange with Keynes in 1938–39. In "The Propensity to Consume" (1938) she criticized Keynes's "fundamental psychological law" for not taking sufficient account of the distribution of income. Her reply in 1939 printed a letter from Keynes, but she remained unconvinced, and in 1940 and 1941 she presented American expenditure–income elasticities for 1935–36 showing that they varied across income levels. Her last book, A Primer on the Economics of Consumption (1968), was a non-technical survey of American consumer behaviour from the 1930s to the 1960s, with a preface by Leontief.

Unemployment and work relief

From 1934 she took part in a study by Harvard and the Massachusetts Emergency Relief Administration of unemployed workers and the state's work-relief programme. Articles from the study showed that relief recipients' spending exceeded their incomes, the gap being met by cashing insurance policies, running down savings and incurring debts, and documented poor diets and malnutrition among them. Her book Applicants for Work Relief (1940), based on more than 2,000 cases, defended the unemployed against critics who regarded them as idle and evaluated work relief favourably as the best available support while cyclical and technological unemployment could not be controlled.

Harvard Economic Research Project

Gilboy's association with Leontief dated from the 1930s; he acknowledged her editorial help in the preface to The Structure of American Economy, 1919–1929 (1941).At the Harvard Economic Research Project she managed the budget and looked after visitors, and her research concentrated on the treatment of consumption in input–output models, which she reported in the project's annual research reports and at the 1955 meeting of the American Economic Association. In 1959 The Harvard Crimson reported her comments on the difficulties developing countries faced in applying input–output methods. She was secretary-general of an international conference on input–output techniques held in Geneva in 1961. With Leontief she advised the 1955 Harvard dissertation of James M. Henderson on the efficiency of the coal industry.

Personal life and death

On 19 April 1930 she married Glennon Gilboy, a professor of engineering at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology from 1925 to 1937 who later went into private practice; they had no children and divorced in November 1953. He died on 18 August 1958. Before and after her retirement she lived in the house of her friend from Radcliffe, the economic historian Elizabeth Boody Schumpeter. She died in Waltham, Massachusetts, on 9 October 1973.

Selected works

• "Some New Evidence on Wage Assessments in the Eighteenth Century". English Historical Review 43 (171), July 1928: 398–408.
• "Demand Curves in Theory and in Practice". Quarterly Journal of Economics 44 (4), 1930: 601–620.
• "The Leontief and Schultz Methods of Deriving 'Demand' Curves". Quarterly Journal of Economics 45 (2), 1931: 218–261.
• "Demand as a Factor in the Industrial Revolution". In Facts and Factors in Economic History. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1932.
• "Labour at Thornborough: An Eighteenth-Century Estate". Economic History Review 3, April 1932: 388–398.
• Wages in Eighteenth Century England. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1934.
• "The Cost of Living and Real Wages in Eighteenth Century England". Review of Economic Statistics 18, August 1936: 134–143.
• "The Propensity to Consume". Quarterly Journal of Economics 53, November 1938: 120–140.
• Applicants for Work Relief: A Study of Massachusetts Families under the FERA and WPA. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1940.
• "Elasticity, Consumption and Economic Growth". American Economic Review 46 (2), May 1956: 119–133.
• A Primer on the Economics of Consumption. New York: Random House, 1968.

References

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