INTRODUCTORY MESSAGE AND OVERVIEW

Primarily for researchers and others in the field, this site covers Dr. Levin's career and work as a pioneer of communications economics, a policy innovator and visionary right up to the time of his death in 1992, and an influential governmental consultant regarding the radio and orbit spectrum, broadcasting ownership and regulation, and global claim-staking of space satellites.

In pioneering the economics of the airwaves and space satellites, Dr. Levin was often met with skepticism and dismissal by government and industry officials – even, initially, disbelief that the airwaves were a resource at all.  It prompted his creation of the now widely used phrase "The Invisible Resource", also the name of his 1971 book which revolutionized the field.  As his space economist protégé Molly Macauley indicated, the competing demands on the increasingly congested electromagnetic field – whose uses range from "radio, television, and everyday telecommunications to wildlife tracking, astronomy, garage door openers, and national defense" – proved his predictions and concerns valid.  And three years after his death, in 1995, the Federal Communications Commission finally began implementing Dr. Levin's long controversial proposals by auctioning off portions of the radio spectrum, or broadcast frequencies, culminating in the Telecommunications Act of 1996.

Focusing on its political ramifications, Dr. Levin’s work was the first to illustrate the economic necessity and benefits of equitable, global allocation of the airwaves as a limited resource, and diversification of its ownership.  He continued to penetrate the frontiers of communications economics even after it evolved into the highly pertinent field it is today – an evolution due, in large part, to his own contributions. In short, as one of his colleagues put it, he espoused "open communication for the weak as well as the strong," and "his books will long be sought in the libraries throughout the world…"

Such achievements impelled Dr. Levin’s election to membership in the Cosmos Club of Washington, D.C., an association of persons deemed to "have done meritorious original work in science, literature, or the arts, or… recognized as distinguished in a learned profession or in public service." They also earned him an invitation to place his papers in the Archive of Contemporary History, devoted to "the history and development of individuals who have played a prominent role in the twentieth century’s social, political, legal and economic scene."

Although, in the tradition of scholarly credibility, Dr. Levin was a stickler for scientific evidence and economic viability, he also viewed economics as an art. He saw it as a vehicle for facilitating social progress in creative ways, particularly the rights, opportunities, facilities and technologies of the underprivileged in America as well as in emerging third world countries.  Most notably, Dr. Levin proposed a system in which latecomer users and emerging, underdeveloped countries would not be deprived of their use of the airwaves by the world powers or monopolies controlling the market.