----------------- HES POSTING ----------------- Walt W. Rostow died on February 13th in Austin, Texas where he was still on the faculty at the age of 86. To see some of the obituaries, you can look at the Uiversity of Texas site at: http://www.eco.utexas.edu/faculty/Rostow/ Professor Rostow was interviewed for The Cliometrics Society Newsletter in 1994. The editors' note of that interview stated: Walt W. Rostow is Rex G. Baker, Jr. Professor Emeritus of Political Economy at the University of Texas at Austin, but still teaches "The World Economy: 1750-1994 " in two terms. He was educated at Yale ('36; Ph.D., 1940) and was a Rhodes Scholar at Oxford (1936-38). During the 1940s he alternated academic with government service: teaching at Columbia in 1940-41, Oxford in 1946-47, and Cambridge in 1949-50, and working with the Office of Strategic Services in Washington and London during the war years (1941-45) and at the United Nations Economic Commission for Europe in 1947- 49. In 1950 he joined the economics faculty at MIT for a decade, during which time he served also as consultant to the Federal Government. He re-entered full-time government service in 1961 for the Kennedy and Johnson administrations, and returned to academic life at the University of Texas in 1969. Our interview took place in mid-March 1994 at Rostow's home in Austin, and was conducted by John V. C Nye (Washington University in St. Louis), who writes: W. W Rostow has been one of the most influential, imposing and controversial figures in the fields of economic history and development for over half a century. He is best known for his book, The Stages of Economic Growth (1960), in which he characterized the process of modern growth through a series of five stages. The book introduced the term 'take-off into sustained growth' to the jargon of economic development and had an enormous impact on the development policy literature. His first works on the growth and development of early industrial Britain, partly in collaboration with Gayer and Schwartz (1953), served as pioneering works of cliometrics before the term was even invented. Despite his early interest in quantification, Rostow remained outside the cliometrics movement of the late '50s and early '60s. He has often referred to himself as a maverick in the profession. His most recent work is a 700+-page history of modern economic thought, Theorists of Economic Growth from David Hume to the Present (1990). You can read the entire interview at http://www.eh.net/Rostow.htm. Samuel H. Williamson Executive Director, Eh.Net (513) 529-2851 fax (513) 529-3308 [log in to unmask] http://www.eh.net ------------ FOOTER TO HES POSTING ------------ For information, send the message "info HES" to [log in to unmask]