Statistician
Economist
Political Analyst

Louis H. Bean was born in Lithuania and immigrated to the United States in 1906 at age ten and lived in Laconia. He graduated from Laconia High School in 1916 and went on to attend the University of Rochester in New York where he obtained a Bachelor of the Arts, completing his studies shortly after being discharged from the U.S. Army, where he served as a Lieutenant in World War I. He later enrolled in Harvard Business School where he obtained a Masters of Business Administration in 1922. The next year, Louis joined the United States Department of Agriculture in Washington D.C., working as an economic analyst and forecaster. During World War II, Mr. Bean served with the Board of Economic Warfare and was chief fiscal analyst of the Budget Bureau. As time went on, he developed an interest in political analysis and accurately predicted every presidential election from 1936 to 1948. He was one of the only statisticians to correctly predict underdog presidential candidate Harry S. Truman’s victory in 1948, which earned him great fame at the time. Mr. Bean continued to use his various systems to predict elections, often with uncanny accuracy, well into the 1960s.  His methods of prediction became widely used and very well-known. For his predictions, he relied on formulas from various statistical indicators found in published material, more than on traditional polling techniques. "I'll lean on a poll sometimes," he told a reporter in a 1956 interview, "but usually I'm way ahead of them."  Louis Bean went on to write several books including the 1948 book "How to Predict Elections." Louis H. Bean was known as one of the greatest economists of the 20th century.