16 Facts About Aaron Director

Aaron Director was a Russian-born American economist and academic who played a central role in the development of law and economics and the Chicago school of economics.

Aaron Director was born to a Jewish family in Staryi Chortoryisk, Volhynian Governorate, Russian Empire on September 21,1901.

In Portland, Aaron Director attended Lincoln High School, where he edited the yearbook.

Aaron Director attended Yale University, which his friend, artist Mark Rothko, attended.

Aaron Director graduated in 1924 with a Bachelor of Arts degree, after three years of study.

Hayek actively promoted Aaron Director in helping to fund and establish the Law and Society program in the Law School.

In 1950, Aaron Director still sympathised with Simons's economic philosophy, and as a result, Luhnow threatened to remove him from the Free Market Study.

Aaron Director taught antitrust courses at the law school with Edward Levi, who was later Dean of Chicago's Law School, President of the University of Chicago, and US Attorney General in the Ford administration.

In 1953, Aaron Director became the head of a new study called the Antitrust Project which aimed to restructure American antitrust law.

The project coincided with the period in which Aaron Director broke from traditional conservative ideas and fused them with the elitism of Veblen and Mencken.

Aaron Director argued that private monopolies only emerged as a result of government action, without which, they would cease to be a problem.

Aaron Director used a two-part strategy to help build up the Chicago school.

Friedman and Stigler were still anti-monopolist, but over the course of the 1950s, Aaron Director convinced them that monopolies would cease to be a problem under the neoliberal framework.

Aaron Director got the doctrine going, and what I had to do was bring it to the gentiles.

Aaron Director viewed human nature deterministically so he argued that the law could be replaced by the scientific principles of economics through efficiency measurements.

Aaron Director died September 11,2004, at his home in Los Altos Hills, California, ten days shy of his 103rd birthday.