Selma Fine Goldsmith


Selma Evelyn Fine Goldsmith was an American economic statistician who accurately estimated the personal income distribution of Americans.

Life

Selma Fine was born in New York City on January 17, 1912, and attended Morris High School in The Bronx. She graduated in 1932 from Cornell University and completed her doctorate in 1936 from Harvard University with a dissertation on 17th- and 18th-century British business cycles.
Fine began working for the United States Department of Agriculture and then for the National Resources Planning Board, where she began working on income tax data. During this time she married Yale economist Raymond W. Goldsmith.
Her major publications on income data were produced later, on the 1950s.
She died of cancer on April 15, 1962.

Recognition

Goldsmith won the Distinguished Service Award of the Department of Commerce in 1955, and a Rockefeller public service award in 1956.
In 1962 she was elected as a Fellow of the American Statistical Association for "numerous definitive studies clarifying the complex relationships among the statistics relating to the distribution of family income, family expenditures, and the national income accounts".