Bruce Zellner

B.A., Economics; M.A., Economics

Bruce Zellner received a BA in economics with a minor in mathematics from the City College of New York in 1963. In 1967, he received an MA in economics from Columbia University where he had a concentration in international finance and trade. Due to the vagaries of the labor market for economists at that time, his first full time position was with the New York City Planning Commission. He believes he was the first economist they had ever hired. He spent four years there applying my skills to a variety of city planning issues ranging from the diseconomies of acquiring larger tracts of land from multiple owners to locating manufacturing zones within the City. Among the issues he had to deal with was determining how many hospital beds New York City needed. That project introduced him to the many problems facing the health care system and set the course for the rest of my work life.

For the next 30 some years he held research and consulting positions, first in Minneapolis, at the Institute for Interdisciplinary Studies, working on ways to restructure the health care system to improve health outcomes and increase efficiency, including working on the Nixon health plan   (Watergate ended that endeavor), then as a consultant to the State of Wisconsin and then as a researcher at the University of Wisconsin. The last six years before retirement in 2000, he worked as a staff researcher in the department of family medicine at the Medical College of Wisconsin and the University of Illinois, School of Medicine at Rockford.

In retirement he continued to do research on a number of statistical problems in diagnostic testing and to publish an occasional article with some of his former colleagues as co-authors. The financial crises of 2007-08 refocused his interests towards issues of banking and finance and macro-economics, area’s he had not thought about since leaving graduate school. By this route he became interested in the problems of the slowing growth rate of the US economy in the past few decades, the lack of increased educational attainment of the US workforce since the early 1970s, and the sharply increasing share of national income going to those at the top of the income distribution, which brings him to the discussion of these issues with the Naples Men’s Discussion Group.