BEFORE NBER: WARREN NUTTER’S SOVIET RESEARCH AT THE CIA
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Warren Nutter’s work as director of the National Bureau of Economic Research’s (NBER) Soviet growth project is his best-known contribution to economics and public affairs. Many histories of Sovietology note the oddity of Nutter’s selection as project director, given his apparent lack of prior experience studying the Soviet Union. This paper provides new context for Nutter’s selection to lead the NBER effort. From 1951 to 1952 Nutter was the acting chief of the Economic Capabilities Branch of the CIA’s Office of Research and Reports (ORR), and chairman of the Economic Analysis Subcommittee of the interagency Economic Intelligence Committee. In this capacity he managed at least three major research efforts, including an input-output analysis of the Soviet Union and contributions to two national intelligence estimates. Nutter may have been proposed as director of the NBER project by Robert Amory, the Deputy Director of Intelligence, in 1953. Nutter’s research for the CIA cultivated new analytic capacities for the agency and provided a foundation for his own work on the Soviet Union.
The University of Virginia economist Warren Nutter made significant contributions to the study of the Soviet economy as director of the National Bureau of Economic Research’s (NBER) 1954 to 1962 project on Soviet growth. During and after the NBER project, Nutter’s work was instrumental in shifting expert and public opinion towards the view that Soviet economic growth was weaker than many Western Sovietologists had estimated and feared (Nutter Reference Nutter 1957a, Reference Nutter 1957b, Reference Nutter 1958, Reference Nutter 1959, Reference Nutter 1962, Reference Nutter 1966). The dramatic clash of intellectual personalities over estimates of Soviet growth has received ample attention (Kestner Reference Kestner 1999; Harrison Reference Harrison 2000; Engerman Reference Engerman 2009; Jefferies Reference Jefferies 2015; Kontorovich Reference Kontorovich 2019), and Nutter’s role has been of particular interest to historians of economics (Levy and Peart Reference Levy and Peart 2015, Reference Levy and Peart 2016, Reference Levy and Peart 2020; Kuehn Reference Kuehn 2021, Reference Kuehn 2023). Despite the large amount of literature on Nutter’s research with the NBER, there is currently no account of his work at the CIA in 1951 and 1952, which followed soon after his graduation from the University of Chicago in 1949 and appointment at Yale in 1950. This is a major gap in the literature because Nutter’s research at the CIA was a vital building block for the agency’s Soviet research program and a precursor to his own work with the NBER.
