Abt Associates Founder, Chairman of the Board (1986-2005) and Chairman Emeritus
The founder and past president of Abt Associates, Clark Abt served as Chairman of the Board of Directors from 1986 to 2005, when he was elected Chairman Emeritus and a Director. The author of ten books on social and economic policies and advanced technologies, as well as many articles, Dr. Abt is an Associate of the Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs at Harvard University and Distinguished Professor of Management at Cambridge College in Cambridge, Massachusetts. For the last six years he has served pro bono in full and part-time capacities, as a high school teacher and tutor for students at risk in the Boston public schools. For the last three years Dr. Abt's research has focused on domestic defense against biological and nuclear terrorism and prevention and control of emerging pandemic diseases.
Dr. Abt attended schools in Germany, Switzerland, New Jersey, New York, and Massachusetts before entering the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) as a freshman in aeronautical engineering in 1947. Prior to entering college he worked as a proof-press printer at the New York Times and as a draftsman at United Aircraft in Connecticut. He graduated with a bachelor's degree in general engineering in 1951 and served four months in the Merchant Marine as an ordinary seaman, followed by a year at Johns Hopkins University as an English instructor. From 1952 to 1953 Dr. Abt worked as a power plant engineer for Bechtel Corporation in San Francisco, and from 1953 to 1957 he served in the U.S. Air Force as electronic countermeasures officer and navigator. From 1957 to 1964 Dr. Abt held engineering and management positions at the Raytheon Company, including managing the Advanced Systems and Strategic Studies Departments within the company's Missile and Space Division.
Dr. Abt founded Abt Associates in 1965 — a company described by President Wendell Knox as "Clark's unique and original vision, a company with the feel of a university but one that also enables entrepreneurial efforts." Another early colleague described the Company as "a mild-mannered social reform organization, an informal graduate school, and a profit-making company."
During the late 1960s and early 1970s, Dr. Abt, then President and Treasurer of Abt Associates, introduced "social accounting" to the Company and business community. Concerned about creating and measuring social benefits efficiently and distributing them equitably, he developed a quantitative approach for evaluating the social benefits and costs of Abt Associates' (or any organization's) operations for its five constituencies: employees, stockholders, clients, neighbors, and the general public. Dr. Abt's social accounting undertaking culminated in his 1976 book, The Social Audit for Management.
In 1968, Dr. Abt directed an experimental women's Job Corps center located at Abt Associates for training single mothers (who resided at the center with their children) in computer programming, childcare, and social work. This soon led Abt Associates to pioneer its own day care research and subsequently, in 1971, to open one of the first corporate day care centers in New England.
In 1969, Dr. Abt directed evaluations of Indian schools in Apache, Hopi, Navaho, Sioux, and other tribal lands and made three films on Indian schools. In the middle seventies he directed a welfare-reform experiment, started up a German subsidiary, Abt Forschung ("Abt Research," since closed), and conducted technology transfer research for the French and German governments; a Canadian subsidiary was also started (since sold). In 1980, Dr. Abt started Abt Computer Graphics Corporation (ACGC) and led the development of several graphics software packages; although the software was innovative, marketing fell below expectations and the enterprise was discontinued.
In 1986, Dr. Abt took a leave of absence to campaign for Congress in the Eighth Massachusetts District, following the retirement of Speaker of the House Thomas P. "Tip" O'Neill. Out-registered (8:1) and outspent (5:1), Dr. Abt lost (3:1) to Joseph P. Kennedy II (nephew of former President John F. Kennedy), but he gained more Democratic than Republican votes in a tough race.
Dr. Abt started Abt Books as a scholarly publishing division of the Company in 1976; in 1984, he initiated the co-publication of Abt Books with Ballinger Publishing Co. and University Press of America. In 1987, after his retirement as CEO of Abt Associates, Dr. Abt took over Abt Books and as its publisher pioneered the production of scholarly and fine arts CD-ROMs. Products included the "Drugs and Crime CD-ROM Library" and the Smithsonian Institution's "National Portrait Gallery on CD-ROM." These technical accomplishments were not commercially successful, so in 1991, after having published some 100 social science books and four CD-ROMs, Dr. Abt closed down Abt Books. For the next four years he taught international relations at Boston University. While at Boston University he created and taught courses in comparative socioeconomic development; he also directed the Center for the Study of Small States (from 1991 to 1993) and the Boston University Defense Technology Conversion Center (from 1991 to 1995). For the following three years he traveled frequently to Belarus, Estonia, Russia, and Ukraine, directing defense-technology-conversion workshops for Russian and American nuclear weapons scientists and engineers.
A long-time proactive environmentalist credited with planting over a thousand trees, Dr. Abt completed in 2001 a design study and economic analysis of an energy-efficient, high-rise, solar-powered office building for the Abt Associates Inc. headquarters complex in Cambridge, Massachusetts. (He had received the grand prize Thoreau Award for the landscape architecture of Abt Associates' Cambridge facilities in 1975.) In 1997, 1998, and 1999, he conducted research and presented papers on renewable energy and environmentally sustainable economic development in the United States, Brazil, China, Great Britain, Kazakhstan, Malaysia, the Philippines, and South Africa, as well as at the United Nations. This work resulted in the book (as yet unpublished), Solar-Powered Economic Growth.
Dr. Abt has a Ph.D. in Political Science from MIT. In addition to teaching at Boston University, he has taught at Harvard University, the Johns Hopkins University, the University of Massachusetts, and the State University of New York (Binghamton). The numerous books that Dr. Abt has written or edited include AIDS and the Courts (editor; 1990), Applied Research for Social Policy: The United States and The Federal Republic of Germany Compared (editor and coauthor; 1979), The Evaluation of Social Programs (editor; 1976), Perspectives on the Costs and Benefits of Applied Social Research (editor; 1979), Problems in American Social Policy Research (editor and coauthor; 1980), Serious Games (1970), The Social Audit for Management (1976), and A Strategy for Terminating a Nuclear War (1986).
Dr. Abt has been engaged in national defense research since 1957, when he conducted analyses of guided missile systems and electronic warfare equipment and operations for the U.S. Air Force, Army, and Navy. From 1963 through 1965, while at Raytheon and continuing into Abt Associates' first year, Dr. Abt designed and developed the first world model of international conflict — the TEMPER computer simulation model (Technological Economic Military Political Evaluation Routine) — for the Department of Defense/Joint Chiefs of Staff. TEMPER was the first dynamic interdisciplinary mathematical model of long-term global Cold War conflict. In 1961 Dr. Abt conducted the Air Force's first study of space-based ballistic missile defense, followed by several other studies on space-based anti-ICBM defense.
Dr. Abt's research on revolutionary conflict and war gaming and simulation in the 1960s suggested that the United States' defeat in Vietnam was predictable. The research indicated that it would be virtually impossible for a numerically inferior defending conventional army to defeat a numerically superior, and highly motivated, guerrilla force operating in its own territory and backed by a larger conventional army in adjacent territory. In the early 1990s, following the breakup of the Soviet Union, Dr. Abt organized and directed four Russian-American Entrepreneurial Workshops in Defense Technology Conversion, and other Soviet defense industry conversion workshops, in Kiev, Moscow, Minsk, Boston, and Livermore (California) for Russian and U.S. nuclear weapons scientists and aerospace engineers.
In 1999, Dr. Abt presented an invited paper at the conference on SOCIAL SCIENCE AND THE FUTURE, at Somerville College, Oxford University, 6-8 July 1999, on "The future of energy, from the perspective of the social sciences," later published as a chapter in the book What the Future Holds: Insights from Social Science, Cooper and Layard, eds., 2002.
Since September 2001, Dr. Abt has devoted much of his time to research and writing on homeland defense of New York and other port cities against catastrophic terrorism involving nuclear and biological weapons of mass destruction (WMD) smuggled into U.S. ports in maritime shipping containers. (Ninety percent of the world's trade — ten trillion dollars' worth, or one third of the annual world product — moves through shipping containers. Seven million containers — approximately half of all container shipments worldwide — move in and out of U.S. ports each year.) Dr. Abt has also been developing systems designs and evaluating WMD detection technologies and biological environmental surveillance and warning systems. He serves as an advisor to the Massachusetts Department of Public Health's Smallpox Working Group and the U.S. Department of Transportation's Volpe National Transportation Systems Center.
In September 2001, Dr. Abt began pro bono work on a study of the economic impacts of bioterrorist and nuclear terrorist attacks on seaport-based cargo transport systems, both under current inadequate conditions and under near-future augmented preventive defense conditions.
