Moses Abramovitz (January 1, 1912 – December 1, 2000) was a 20th-century American economist and professor. During his career, he made many contributions to the study of macroeconomic fluctuations and economic growth over time. Biography Born and raised in a Jewish family in Brooklyn, New York, he completed his bachelor's degree in economics summa cum laude at Harvard University. He went to Harvard with the intention of becoming a lawyer and studied criminal justice as well as economics. However, he became more interested in economics because he was able to connect it to the world in which he was living. He earned his Ph.D. at Columbia University in 1939. In 1985, he was awarded an honorary doctorate from the Faculty of Social Sciences at Uppsala University, Sweden. In 1992, he was invited to Rome to become a fellow of the prestigious Accademia Nazionale Dei Lincei. He was awarded another doctorate from the University of Ancona in 1992. Abramovitz died at Stanford Hospital in California on December 1, 2000, at the age of 88, after contracting a gastrointestinal infection. Abramovitz, called Moe by family and friends, was known for his modest personality and was described as one of the least ego-driven scholars in economics. He married Carrie Glasser, a Brooklyn-born painter and sculptor, in 1937. She died in 1999. Abramovitz started his career as a lecturer at Harvard in the mid-1930s. After finishing his doctorate at Columbia, he joined the National Bureau of Economic Research in New York, where he began his investigation of inventory investment cycles. During World War II, Abramovitz served on the War Production Board and in the Office of Strategic Services as chief of the European industry and trade section. In 1945 and 1946, he was an economic adviser to the United States representative on the Allied Reparations Commission. He was also a founding faculty member of the Department of Economics at Stanford University, which he joined in the fall of 1948. He taught there for almost 30 years. From 1962 to 1963, he was the adviser to the secretary general of the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development in Paris. He then served as the organization chair from 1963 to 1965 and from 1971 to 1974. Over the course of his career, Abramovitz carried out many pioneering studies of macroeconomics and long-term growth. His 1986 article, "Catching Up, Forging Ahead and Falling Behind" is the second