Alice Hanson Jones

Alice Hanson Jones (born Alice Cable Hanson; November 7, 1904 – August 30, 1985 or 1986) was an American economist and economic historian. After three decades as a government economist studying family income and spending, she produced the first systematic estimates of the wealth of the Thirteen Colonies on the eve of the American Revolution, based on a sample of probate inventories from 1774. Her book Wealth of a Nation to Be (1980) and the data set underlying it remain standard sources for the economic history of colonial America. She was president of the Economic History Association, which awards a prize in her name.

Early life and education

Alice Cable Hanson was born in Seattle, Washington, on November 7, 1904, to Olof Hanson and Agatha Marie (Teigel) Hanson. She received an AB from the University of Washington in 1925, was a teaching fellow there in 1927–28, and received an MA in 1928. She also studied economics at the University of Chicago, where Hazel Kyrk supported her interest in the economics of consumption, Chester W. Wright directed it toward historical questions, and Frank Knight was a theoretical influence. She began doctoral work in 1934 on the standard of living in the northern American colonies around 1770, a dissertation she would not complete for more than three decades.

Career

Government economist

In 1930 she became an assistant editor of the Encyclopaedia of the Social Sciences, and in 1931 a researcher and writer for the President's Research Committee on Social Trends in New York City. From 1934 to 1944, as Alice C. Hanson, she was an economist in the Cost of Living Division of the Bureau of Labor Statistics in Washington, D.C., where she studied living conditions and household budgets. She wrote on the living conditions of workers in Puerto Rico for the Monthly Labor Review (1941) and co-authored the Bureau's wartime surveys of urban family income, spending and saving. One of her Bureau colleagues, the statistician Jerome Cornfield, later helped design the sample for her colonial wealth study.

She worked for the Bureau of the Budget from 1945 to 1948. In 1957 she returned to research as secretary of the Committee on National Accounts at the National Bureau of Economic Research in Washington, working with the economist Raymond W. Goldsmith, and from 1958 to 1961 she was a supervising economist in the Consumer and Food Economics Research Division of the United States Department of Agriculture.

Academic career

Jones became a lecturer in economics at Washington University in St. Louis in 1963. In 1968 she completed her doctorate at the University of Chicago with a dissertation titled "Wealth Estimates for the American Middle Colonies, 1774", published in revised form as a supplement to Economic Development and Cultural Change in 1970. Her thesis committee was chaired by Robert Fogel, who had suggested that a cluster sample of probate inventories might yield a wealth estimate; its other members were John G. Cragg and Robert F. Dernberger. The research was supported by a National Science Foundation computing grant and a 1966 grant-in-aid from the Council on Research in Economic History. She finished the last chapters in Korea, where in 1967–68 she advised the Bank of Korea and the United States Agency for International Development on planning a study of Korean national wealth.

After receiving her PhD she became an assistant professor at Washington University, and in 1971 an associate professor. In 1973 she became an adjunct professor, a post she held until her retirement in 1977.

Economic History Association

Jones was vice-president of the Economic History Association in 1976–77 and its president in 1982–83, and a trustee from 1983 to 1986. She chaired the program committee for the association's 1982 annual meeting.

Colonial wealth research

Jones's central project was to estimate the total and per capita wealth of the thirteen colonies in 1774, along with its composition and distribution. She drew a sample of 919 probate inventories of decedents from 21 counties across New England, the Middle Colonies and the South, and weighted the sample to represent the living population of wealthholders. Her regional findings appeared in journal articles, including a study of New England in The Journal of Economic History (1972), which showed that wealth was unequally distributed well before industrialization and related wealth to the age, sex, occupation and urban or rural residence of wealthholders.

The full documentation and transcribed inventories were published as American Colonial Wealth: Documents and Methods (3 vols., 1977; 2nd ed. 1978), and the synthesis as Wealth of a Nation to Be: The American Colonies on the Eve of the Revolution (Columbia University Press, 1980). Her machine-readable data were deposited with the Inter-university Consortium for Political and Social Research, where they remain available to researchers.

Personal life and death

On April 21, 1930, she married the economist Homer Jones, later research director and senior vice president of the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis; they had three children. She died in St. Louis on August 30, 1985 or 1986.

Legacy

Jones's probate-based estimates became a benchmark for later work on early American living standards and inequality. In revising estimates of colonial incomes, Peter Lindert and Jeffrey Williamson described her study of American wealth in 1774 as "exhaustive and masterly" and built their own property-income estimates on her sample. Her study "The Wealth of Women, 1774", completed with Boris Simkovich from versions of a paper she had written in 1980 and found among her papers, was published posthumously in a 1992 National Bureau of Economic Research volume honoring Robert Fogel.

The Economic History Association awards the biennial Alice Hanson Jones Prize for an outstanding book on North American economic history. Her papers are held by the Rare Book and Manuscript Library of Columbia University.

Selected works

• Hanson, Alice C. (1941). "Living Conditions of Workers in Puerto Rico". Monthly Labor Review 52.
• Jones, Alice Hanson (1970). "Wealth Estimates for the American Middle Colonies, 1774". Economic Development and Cultural Change 18 (4, Part 2).
• Jones, Alice Hanson (1972). "Wealth Estimates for the New England Colonies about 1770". The Journal of Economic History 32 (1): 98–127.
• Jones, Alice Hanson (1977). American Colonial Wealth: Documents and Methods. 3 vols. New York: Arno Press. 2nd ed. 1978.
• Jones, Alice Hanson (1980). Wealth of a Nation to Be: The American Colonies on the Eve of the Revolution. New York: Columbia University Press.
• Jones, Alice Hanson (1984). "Wealth and Growth of the Thirteen Colonies: Some Implications". The Journal of Economic History 44 (2): 239–254.
• Jones, Alice Hanson (1992). "The Wealth of Women, 1774". In Claudia Goldin and Hugh Rockoff (eds.), Strategic Factors in Nineteenth-Century American Economic History. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, pp. 243–263.

External links

• American Colonial Wealth Estimates, 1774 (ICPSR data set)
• Works by Alice Hanson Jones on FRASER