Walter A. Friedman, Lecturer of Business Administration at the Harvard Business School, director of its Business History Initiative, and coeditor of the Business History Review , has won the 2015 Hagley Prize in Business History for his book Fortune Tellers: The Story of America’s First Economic Forecasters.
Established and funded by the Hagley Museum and Library of Wilmington, Delaware, one of the nation’s most significant research libraries dedicated to the history of business, since 1999 the prize has annually honored “the best book in business history (broadly defined).”
The prize, including a medallion and $2,500, was presented on June 27 in Miami at the annual meeting of the Business History Conference, a scholarly organisation devoted to encouraging all aspects of research, writing, and teaching about business history and the environment in which business operates.
Fortune Tellers chronicles the lives and careers of pioneering economic forecasters in the period leading up to the Great Depression, including Roger Babson, Irving Fisher, John Moody, C J Bullock, and Warren Persons. Using the tools of science to predict the future and profit from their forecasts, they competed to sell their predictions to investors and businesses in the boom years in the US economy after World War I. Yet for all intents and purposes they failed to predict the Crash of 1929. Nevertheless, this first generation of economic forecasters helped to make the prediction of economic trends a central economic activity, and they shed light on the mechanics of financial markets by providing a range of statistics and information about individual firms.
Friedman is also the author of Birth of a Salesman: The Transformation of Selling in America . He is currently writing on the history of American businesses from 1945 to 1980.