Karl G. Karsten

Karl Gustaf Karsten (1891 – 1968) was an American economist, statistician, businessman, inventor and author, known from his seminal work on graphical methods, and economic forecasting.

Born in Bloomington, Indiana to Gustaf E. and Eleanor S. Daggett Karsten, Karsten received his education as economist and statistician. He was student at the University of Illinois in 1907-1908, and at the University of Chicago in 1908-1909, and obtained his BA from the University of New Mexico in 1911 and from Oxford University in 1914 on a Rhodes Scholarship. From 1914 to 1916 he was graduate student at the Columbia University.

Karsten started his career as Newspaper Reporter and Publicity Agent in New York City in 1916. The next year he settled as independent consulting statistician, and founded Karsten Statistical Laboratory in New Haven, Connecticut. As statistician Karsten was also specialized in unemployment remedies. In 1926 he became president and general manager of the Kardex Institute, a company founded in 1921 by James Rand, Jr. to collect and disseminate information on good business record-keeping and filing practices. Late 1920s Karsten founded the Karsten Forecasts, inc. in New Haven, and early 1930s the Irving Fisher Index Number Institute with Irving Fisher also in New Haven, CT. From 1934 to 1942 he was appointed in multiple federal agencies.

Karsten had joint the Liberal Club of New York and the Anti-Militarism League in the 1910s. In 1917 he married his first wife Elinor Cox, and had a daughter together. In the 1920s Karsten build a summer stack out in Far Rockaway, where the invited Henry Miller and his family in the summer of 1925. Later on he got married to Helen Tippy.

Since the 1920s Karsten published a series of works on charts and graphs and economic forecasting. He also he invented and patented several information processing devices.

In the 1910s charts and graphs had become a prominent subject in the theoretical discussion of methodology in the social sciences, and Karsten was one of the first to publish a book solely on this topic. Karsten (1923) explained:

In 1923 he published his most known work "Charts and graphs: An introduction to graphic methods in the control and analysis of statistics." This work was especially focussed on statistics, and years ahead of its time.

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