Leland Olds

Who was Leland Olds?

Leland Olds was an American economist. Olds was interested in labor, development of public electric power, and ecology.

Olds was a son of George Olds, president of Amherst College. He studied mathematics at Amherst. At Amherst he was influenced by the social work movement and the Social Gospel.

“Jolly, witty, informal” as well as “very fair-minded” and an accomplished cellist, Olds had been a minister, a teacher at Amherst, a researcher both for the federal government and the American Federation of Labor and a labor journalist before he met Franklin D. Roosevelt. As governor of New York, Roosevelt appointed him to the New York State Power Authority. Olds believed in the “complete passing of the old order of capitalism”. A complete transformation of the American economic system was needed, which had to depart from its laissez-faire impetus and economic individualism. As an alternative, Olds favored consumer cooperation as the basis of a new American economic model. Complementary to his cooperative beliefs, Olds was “very much consumer oriented”.