Simon Smith Kuznets was born in Belarus in the town of Pinsk to Lithuanian-Jewish parents, in the year 1901. He completed his schooling, first at the Kharkiv Commercial Institute at the University of Kharkiv of present-day Ukraine. There he began to study economics and became exposed to Joseph Schumpeter's theory of innovation and the Business cycle. In 1918, Kuznets entered the Kharkiv Institute of Commerce where he studied economic sciences, statistics, history and mathematics under the guidance of professors P. Fomin (political economy), A. Antsiferov (statistics), V. Levitsky (economic history and economic thought), S. Bernstein (probability theory), V. Davats (mathematics), and others. Basic academic courses at the Institute helped him to acquire “exceptional” erudition in economics, as well as in history, demography, statistics and natural sciences. According to the Institute’s curriculum, development of the national economies had to be analyzed in the wider context of changes in connected spheres and with involvement of proper methods and empirical data.