Arthur Melvin Okun

Arthur Melvin "Art" Okun (November 28, 1928 – March 23, 1980) was an American economist. He served as the chairman of the Council of Economic Advisers between 1968 and 1969. Before serving on the C.E.A., he was a professor at Yale University and, afterwards, was a fellow at the Brookings Institution in Washington, D.C. In 1968 he was elected as a Fellow of the American Statistical Association.

Okun is known in particular for promulgating Okun's law, an observed relationship that states that for every 1% increase in the unemployment rate, a country's GDP will be roughly an additional 2.5% lower than its potential GDP. He is also known as the creator of the misery index and the analogy of the deadweight loss of taxation with a leaky bucket. He died on March 23, 1980, of a heart attack.

Okun graduated from Columbia College in 1949 with the Albert Asher Green Memorial Prize for the highest GPA. He went on to obtain a Ph.D. in economics from Columbia in 1956 before teaching at Yale University.

Works

 * Equality and Efficiency: The Big Tradeoff (Washington, D.C.: Brookings Institution, 1975)
 * Prices and Quantities: A Macroeconomic Analysis, see here (1981) ISBN 0-8157-6480-4