Author: Henry Rogers Seager

Seager taught economics at Columbia for nearly thirty years and belonged to the generation of American economists who came home from German universities convinced the state had work to do. He helped found the American Association for Labor Legislation and pressed for workmen's compensation, for limits on child labour and for what would later be called social insurance, decades before any of it reached the statute book. His textbook was standard in American classrooms for years. He died suddenly in 1930 in Kyiv, in the middle of a study tour of the Soviet Union that he had undertaken to look at a planned economy for himself.