Aaron Director

Aaron Director (September 21, 1901 – September 11, 2004) was a Russian-born American economist and academic who played a central role in the development of law and economics and the Chicago school of economics.

Quotes about Aaron Director

• The economics of the famous Chicago core curriculum had taken place during that first quarter. So to make up for my deficiency, I was put in an old-fashioned introductory course in economics. That worked out very well because the teacher was Aaron Director. He was a person who has never published anything important, but he was very influential. He really was the one who converted the first Chicago School of Frank Knight, Jacob Viner and Paul Douglas, which was pretty eclectic, into the second one, with Milton Friedman and so forth. I guess with Gary Becker et al. we’re at the third right now. So there I was, completely by chance, and I discovered the subject that interested me and that I would be good at. Economics is a subject which is quite attractive to somebody who is both interested in statistics, analysis, metrics, but also in people and policies. And so I became a very good student there.
  • Paul Samuelson, in an interview published in Karen Ilse Horn (ed.), Roads to Wisdom, Conversations with Ten Nobel Laureates in Economics (2009)