Otto Eckstein

Otto Eckstein (August 1, 1927 – March 22, 1984) was a German-American economist and educator. He was a key developer and proponent of the theory of core inflation, which proposed that in determining accurate metrics of long run inflation, the transitory price changes of items subject to volatile pricing, such as food and energy, are to be excluded from computation.

Education and career Eckstein was born in Ulm, Germany in 1927 to a Jewish family. His father, Hugo Eckstein is a businessman and the brother of the pediatrician Albert Eckstein. In 1938, when Otto Eckstein was 11 years old, he and several other family members fled the Nazi regime, first emigrating to England, and then, a year later, moving to the United States, where he made his permanent home. He studied at the Stuyvesant High School in New York City, where he graduated in 1946. He became a naturalized citizen in the United States in 1945. After one year's military service, Eckstein enrolled at Princeton University in 1947 and he received an A.B. in economics in 1951. He went on to obtain an M.A. and a Ph.D. in economics from Harvard University in 1952 and 1955, respectively. His PhD thesis, titled Water-Resource Development: The Economics of Project Evaluation, was later published as a book by the Harvard University Press in 1958.

After receiving his Ph.D., Eckstein became an instructor in economics at Harvard University in 1955. In 1957, he became an assistant professor in the same department. He was promoted to an associate professor in 1960 and a full professor in 1963 at Harvard University. Eckstein is an economic consultant to President Lyndon Baines Johnson in 1964, and a member of the President's Council of Economic Advisers from 1964 to 1966. In 1969, he and Donald Marron co-founded Data Resources Inc., the largest non-governmental distributor of economic data in the world,

In 1969, Eckstein was elected as a Fellow of the Econometric Society. In 1975, he was elected as a Fellow of the American Statistical Association. In 1979 he sold DRI for over $100 million to McGraw Hill.

Personal life Eckstein was married to Harriett Mirkin in 1954. They had three children. He died of cancer in 1984, at the age of 56.