Otto Eckstein and the Founding of Data Resources, Inc
由数据资源公司联合创始人讲述1968年与奥托·埃克斯坦共同创立公司的经历，包括从咨询业务到开发经济计量模型的转变，适合对经济史、创业和计量经济学感兴趣的人阅读。
OTTO ECKSTEIN and I founded Data Resources, Inc. in 1968 after working together on Wall Street for several years. We came to know each other during the mid-1960s while I was attempting to build up the institutional stock brokerage business of Mitchell Hutchins and Co. The firm's business was mainly retail in nature, and we needed to distinguish ourselves from the competition in some fundamental way if we were quickly to establish an institutional franchise. I hit upon the idea of developing a consisting of nationally recognized authorities who would give portfolio managers expert insight into both the state of the economy and the larger political and diplomatic environment shaping economic conditions. I therefore put the following question to a number of my colleagues on Wall Street: Who is the best young economist you can think of to fill this role? The most frequent reply was Eckstein, who had just stepped down from the Council of Economic Advisers. I gave Otto a call and laid out my plans. He liked the proposal, and soon we were travelling around the country, meeting with clients and presenting our view of economic conditions. Bright and charismatic, Otto was very popular with clients. The consulting program was a great success and was later expanded with Otto's help to include Henry Kissinger and Bill Moyers. While Otto and I were on the road, we taught each other. He taught me a great deal about economics, and I introduced him to the world of commerce. Otto quickly learned that money managers were intelligent, interesting, and well-informed peoplesomething of a revelation to a long-time denizen of Washington, D. C. and Cambridge, Massachusetts. This was the first of many steps in Otto's business education, an on-the-job MBA that would eventually turn him into an accomplished businessman as well as a respected economist. Travelling was a tedious and time consuming way to impart information to our clients, and some time in 1967 Otto suggested to me that perhaps we could use a computer instead. If we set up a model that clients could access by timesharing they would be able not only to get Otto's most recent forecast when they needed it, but could shift the inputs in the model to reflect their own economic assumptions. If, for example, they thought mortgage rates would be 6% rather than 5% and that consumer spending would slow in the second half of the year rather than hold steady, they could plug these assumptions into the model and see how other variables changed. It struck me as an ambitious but promising project. Otto had formulated his basic view of how the economy worked from his early input-output research in graduate school, and then his extensive studies of the U.S. economy for Congress. Also he had produced a steady flow of micro-macro economic analyses at the Council of Economic Advisers. So, he was well along in his thinking about computer modeling of the economy. We discussed the project at great length, and I asked Otto to write a paper laying out his ideas more fully. The product concept developed by Otto had four basic elements-the model itself, a large data base, a computer, and the software-and each of them posed formidable obstacles for a fledgling enterprise like ours. Rather than use any of the econometric models then available Otto decided to build a new model of his own design-an admirable decision but an onerous task that challenged, I believe, even his formidable knowledge of economics and statistics. In building this model Otto worked with Gary Fromm of the Brookings Institution, who had developed a model of his own and was familiar with the latest advances in econometrics. He also consulted with other leading econometricians, including Martin Feldstein, Lester Thurow, and Dale Jorgenson. Even more important to our efforts was the Brookings database, which consisted not only of a large number of time series, but of subroutines for managing the data. Clearly the prior work of Fromm and his associates enabled Otto to begin much further up on the learning curve than he otherwise could have. Two members of the Brookings staff, James Craig and John Ahlstrom, joined our company and made herculean efforts to build *Paine Webber Group Inc.