Melman, Seymour

BIOGHIST REQUIRED Author and professor of industrial engineering at Columbia University. Prof. Melman was born in 1917.

Seymour Melman (1918-2004), an economist who taught industrial engineering at Columbia, helped galvanize the antiwar movement from the 1950's on with analyses of the social costs of military spending, diverting resources from health care, public housing and education. He was a leading advocate of nuclear disarmament, and a longtime co-chairman of the Committee for a Sane Nuclear Policy. His later books, including After Capitalism: From Managerialism to Workplace Economy (2001), describe the potential of employee self-management, an idea that interested him for decades. As a young man, he briefly lived on a kibbutz in Israel, and later in his career participated in studies and meetings on the productivity of such collective settlements.

Professor Seymour Melman worked at the Department of Industrial Engineering and Operations Research, Columbia University. He is the author of Decision-Making and Productivity (Oxford, 1958), which was primarily concerned with the Standard Motor Co. Ltd., Canley, Coventry.

Reference: Finding aid for MSS.254.