Leland Olds

Leland Olds (December 31, 1890 – August 5, 1960) was an American economist 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 where 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. During 1918 and 1919 he was, along with Thorstein Veblen, part of the original Technical Alliance- a forerunner to the Technocracy movement ) In 1920 he met Franklin D. Roosevelt, Governor of New York, who appointed him to the New York State Power Authority.

In 1936, Olds served on Roosevelt's Presidential Inquiry Commission on Cooperative Enterprise in Europe.

Olds was a deeply religious and idealistic man, who after a long search for a worthy cause to give purpose to his life, had completely dedicated himself to the public power fight. Wide availability of cheap power was crucial, Olds felt, for the social well being of the mass of the American people.

He 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”. Olds believed that, together with regulation and community owned power generation and distribution, consumer cooperation was the key to a fair power policy. In 1927 Olds advocated the operating of all hydropower utilities as “giant consumer cooperatives”.

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