Nathan Associates Revenue and Competitors

In founding one of the world’s first economic consulting firms, Robert Nathan took what he called the “third step” from the ivory tower of academic economics. He took the first step when he surveyed the unemployed during the Great Depression for one of his professors at Wharton. Of that experience, he said “Once I saw [how] the widening depression ground into the dust ... lives and enterprises as though they were cigarette butts, I could no longer continue to distance myself from damaging problems and policies." He took the second step as deputy director of the Office of War Mobilization and Reconversion (OWMR) and chairman of the Planning Committee of the War Production Board. Drawing on that experience in Mobilizing for Abundance (1943), he reasoned that the same economic principles applied to achieve wartime victory could be applied to get the peacetime economy rolling again. Economists, he believed, could be effective in all spheres, from postwar recovery at home to advising developing countries.