Today we celebrate the 100th anniversary of the birth of Professor David F. Linowes (1917-2007), who was an invaluable contributor to the Cline Center, a distinguished alumnus (Honors, ’41), and inspiring public intellectual.
In addition to serving as the Boeschenstein Professor of Political Economy and Public Policy at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign and as Professor of Business Administration in the College of Business, Professor Linowes was a highly-successful accountant and a dedicated public servant under Presidents Lyndon Johnson, Gerald Ford, Jimmy Carter and Ronald Reagan.
Best known for leading a highly-influential post-Watergate commission on the future of privacy law, he also led three other presidential commissions and State Department and UN missions to countries in South America and Asia to disseminate best practices for privatization programs. A veteran of WWII, he authored more than a dozen books and was known as the “father of socio-economic accounting” — a method of incorporating social and environmental impacts into decision-making.
Thanks to the generosity of the Linowes family, this legacy of service and scholarship lives on at the U of I. Since 2012, Linowes Faculty Fellows at the Cline Center have pursued projects that bring cutting-edge methods and data to bear on pressing social and political problems. They also select a distinguished speaker for the annual Linowes Lecture on Public Policy and Management.
This year’s talk, scheduled for April 26th, will tackle analytical problems similar to the ones that Prof. Linowes studied. Professor Scott E. Page, Hurwicz Professor of Complex Systems, Political Science, and Economics at the University of Michigan, will describe novel ways to inform cost-benefit analysis using ensembles of many quantitative models simultaneously. Integrating ideas from physics, computer science, economics and statistics, Professor Page’s proposed method echoes Linowes’ own interdisciplinary approach to policymaking by—in the words of David Linowes—taking “into account more points of view than would normally be considered” and enabling “all relevant sources of expertise, and all affected interests to be brought together for sustained, focused, and creative analysis of issues.”
The public is welcome to attend, and a livestream video will be available on our Facebook page — just ‘like’ us and stay tuned. To learn more about the Linowes Lectures or watch them online, see: http://www.clinecenter.illinois.edu/news/events/linoweslectures/
And to learn more about Professor Linowes’ life and legacy, check out today’s commemorative announcement from the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences.
