Maurice Block

Who was Maurice Block?

Maurice Block was a German-French statistician and economist.

He was born in Berlin of Jewish parents. He studied at the University of Bonn and the University of Heidelberg and received his doctorate from the University of Tübingen. In the mid-1840s he moved to Paris to become a stastician with the French ministry of agriculture. In 1853 he moved on to the General Statistic service.

Beginning in 1856, Block edited L'Annuaire de l'economie politique et de la statistique. He remained the editor until 1901. Block, along with many French economists of his time, believed that economics was too complex of a subject to be amenable to mathematical techniques.

He retired in 1862 and thenceforth wrote predominantly on the topics of agriculture, finance and public administration, turning to criticism of socialism in the 1890s. A prolific writer, he was published in a number of academic and professional magazines and journals of the time. He continued to devote himself to statistical studies as well.

He was elected a member of the Academie des Sciences Morales et Politiques in 1880. He died in Paris on the 9th of January 1901.