Economist and scholar Charles Wolf Jr. has died at the age of 92. The RAND Corporation, Wolf’s home for more than 60 years, has released a statement.
“Charlie Wolf was a significant figure at RAND for much of its history,” said Michael D. Rich, president and chief executive officer of the RAND Corporation. “As a leader of our Economics Department and founding dean of our graduate school, he helped shape generations of economists, statisticians and policy analysts. And his personal research made impressive scholarly contributions to several fields at critical junctures in time.”
Among Wolf’s accomplishments was a 1983 report entitled “The Costs of the Soviet Empire,” which examined the economic burdens borne by the Soviet Union in the preceding decade and predicted the collapse of the USSR years before it happened.
Wolf was also a contributor to THE WEEKLY STANDARD. His most recent article, a review of Bourgeois Equality by Deirdre Nansen McCloskey, ran in the October 10 issue. Read an excerpt below:
