Robert Nathan, an economist who helped lead the nation’s industrial mobilization in World War II, died Tuesday at a group home in Bethesda, Md. He was 92 and lived in Bethesda.
Mr. Nathan spent most of the 1930s with the Commerce Department before becoming chairman of the War Production Board’s planning committee in 1942 at age 33.
In the years before the U.S. entered the war, Mr. Nathan often criticized what he called the nation’s lackadaisical approach to increasing production.
During the war Mr. Nathan set production goals and helped achieve them by finding ways to increase factory production.
Reared in Dayton, Ohio, Mr. Nathan worked his way through the University of Pennsylvania by selling silk stockings and telephone memo pads and by working in a factory at night. After receiving a master’s degree in 1933, he joined the Commerce Department, working on studies of national income.
In 1946, Mr. Nathan left government service and started an economic consulting firm, Robert R. Nathan Associates, where he served as chairman until last month. Mr. Nathan’s firm has conducted studies for industry associations and federal agencies and has had as clients the governments of several countries, including El Salvador, Israel and Vietnam.
For a time in the 1950s, Mr. Nathan served as chairman of Americans for Democratic Action, a liberal advocacy group. In that position, he criticized the Eisenhower administration for its policy-making and supported a more liberal approach. In 1959, the group called for undiminished contributions to the United Nations, an expanded foreign aid program, a congressional pledge of full employment and a 67 percent increase in the minimum wage.
In 1968, Mr. Nathan served as an adviser to Hubert H. Humphrey’s presidential campaign.
