Mordecai Ezekiel

Mordecai Joseph Brill Ezekiel (May 10, 1899 October 31, 1974) was an American agrarian economist who worked for the United States government and the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO).[1][2] He was a "New Deal economic advisor" who shaped much of the President Franklin D. Roosevelt's agricultural policy.[3]

Education

Career

He is credited with formulating the details of what was to become the Agriculture Adjustment Administration, and helped prepare a draft of the Agricultural Adjustment Act. After the 1932 presidential election, he also met with President-elect Franklin Roosevelt, Rexford Tugwell, M. L. Wilson, and Henry Morgenthau, Jr., to discuss the farm policy of the new administration.

He and G.C. Haas described the pork cycle.

Personal life

Born in Richmond, Virginia, he was the son of Jacob and Rachel Brill Ezekiel (who had been a secretary to the suffragist Carrie Chapman Catt). He had two brothers, Walter Naphtali Ezekiel, a plant pathologist, and Raphael Ezekiel, a graduate of West Point, and one sister, Bertha Brill Ezekiel (Topkis).

Ezekiel married Lucille Finsterwald and they had three children—David, Jonathan, and Margot. He was also the uncle of the Hebrew poet Yosef Yehezkel. Herbert Ezekiel endowed a scholarship under his name at the University of Maryland in 1974.[3]

Select bibliography

References

  1. "Papers of Mordecai J. B. Ezekiel". FDR Presidential Library. Retrieved 5 March 2015.
  2. "Papers of Mordecai J. B. Ezekiel" (PDF). Retrieved 5 March 2015.
  3. 3.0 3.1 "Dr. Mordecai Ezekiel Memorial Fund". University of Maryland. Retrieved 5 March 2015.
  4. "Mordecai Ezekiel". John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation. Retrieved 5 March 2015.
  5. Phillips, Ralph W. (1981). "The Founding of FAO". FAO: Its Origins, Formation and Evolution, 1945–1981. Rome: UN Food and Agriculture Organization.
  6. David Jennings (Winter 1940). "Jobs for All, through Industrial Expansion by Mordecai Ezekiel". Science & Society 4 (1): 93–96.