Dave O'Neill

Dave O’Neill, 83, died Oct. 22 at his home in New York City.   Dave was an economist.   His career included academic appointments, time spent in Washington DC think tanks, the federal government, and the New York Federal Reserve Bank.  He was a passionate advocate for free markets.  Dave was born in New York City and raised in the Bronx.   He attended Baruch College and received his Ph.D in economics from Columbia University.

He was the son of David Stein and Margaret Sievert.  Stein died when Dave was 12, and Dave subsequently took the name of Margaret’s second husband, Thomas O’Neill.   Dave is survived by his wife, June, his children Amy Prial and Peter Cohn, half-sister Cookie and half-brother Tom, and grandchildren Abe, Anna, Ben, Clayton and Gilroy.

He met June when they were students in the economics department at Columbia.  They married in 1964.   They both studied under economists Gary Becker and Jacob Mincer, and together have gone on to champion economic analysis and free market ideas, sometimes jointly authoring studies, papers and a 2012 book, “The Declining Importance of Race and Gender in the Labor Market.

Dave taught economics at the University of Pennsylvania, Pace University and Baruch College/CUNY.   In the early 1970s, Dave and his family moved to Washington, and Dave joined the Center for Naval Analysis.   He went on to hold positions at the American Enterprise Institute, the General Accounting Office, and the Bureau of the Census.

The O’Neills returned to New York in 1988, where Dave worked at the New York Federal Reserve, the Nathan Klein Insitute, and then returned to teaching at Pace and Baruch.  He served in the US Army during the Korean War, stationed in Japan.

He was a great lover of movies and of the great American song writers, particularly Cole Porter.