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Wesley Clair Mitchell (August 5, 1874 – October 29, 1948) was an American economist known for his empirical work on business cycles and for guiding the National Bureau of Economic Research in its first decades. Jump to: navigation, search August 5 is the 217th day of the year in the Gregorian Calendar (218th in leap years), with 148 days remaining. ...
Jump to: navigation, search 1874 was a common year starting on Thursday (see link for calendar). ...
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An economist is someone who studies Economics. ...
Jump to: navigation, search An abstract business cycle The business cycle or economic cycle refers to the ups and downs seen somewhat simultaneously in most parts of an economy. ...
The National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER) is a private, nonprofit, nonpartisan research organization dedicated to studying the science and empirics of economics, especially the American economy. ...
Wesley Mitchell was born in Rushville, Illinois, the second child and oldest son of a Civil War army doctor turned farmer. In a family with seven children and a disabled father with an appetite for business ventures "verging on rashness" a lot of responsibility fell on the oldest son. Despite these difficult circumstances Wesley Clair went to study at the University of Chicago and was awarded a PhD in 1899. Rushville is a city located in Schuyler County, Illinois. ...
The University of Chicago is a private co-educational university located in Chicago, Illinois. ...
Mitchell’s teachers included economists Thorstein Veblen and J. L. Laughlin and philosopher John Dewey. Although Veblen and Dewey did more to shape Mitchell’s outlook, Laughlin supervised his dissertation. Laughlin's main interest was in currency questions; he was a strong opponent of the quantity theory of money. The currency question facing the US in the 1890s was the choice between alternative monetary standards, inconvertible paper, gold monometallism and gold/silver bimetallism. Mitchell’s thesis, published as A History of Greenbacks, considered the consequences of the inconvertible paper regime established by the Union in the Civil War. However this, and the follow-up study Gold Prices and Wages Under the Greenback Standard, transcended conventional monetary history of the kind Laughlin did and provided a comprehensive quantitative account of the behaviour of the US economy in the recent past. American economist and sociologist Thorstein Veblen Thorstein Bunde Veblen (July 30, 1857 - August 3, 1929) was a Norwegian-American economist and sociologist. ...
Jump to: navigation, search John Dewey (October 20, 1859 – June 1, 1952) was an American philosopher, psychologist, and educational reformer, whose thought has been greatly influential in the United States and around the world. ...
Velocity of money In economics, the velocity of money refers to a key term in the quantity theory of money, which centers on the equation of exchange: M*V = P*Q where M is the total amount of money in circulation in an economy at any one time (say, on...
Jump to: navigation, search General Name, Symbol, Number gold, Au, 79 Chemical series transition metals Group, Period, Block 11, 6, d Appearance metallic yellow Atomic mass 196. ...
1922 U.S. gold certificate The gold standard is a monetary system in which the standard economic unit of account is a fixed weight of gold and currency issuers guarantee, under specified rules, to redeem notes in that amount of gold. ...
In economics, bimetallism is a monetary standard in which the value of the monetary unit can be expressed either with a certain amount of gold or with a certain amount of silver: the ratio between the two metals is fixed by law. ...
Jump to: navigation, search The American Civil War (1861–1865) was fought in North America within the United States of America, between twenty-three mostly northern states of the Union and the Confederate States of America, a coalition of eleven southern states that declared their independence and claimed the right...
Mitchell's next project, which would occupy him for the rest of his life, was the business cycle, then emerging as the big problem in economics. His masterpiece, Business Cycles, appeared in 1913. The Preface begins
This book offers an analytic description of the complicated processes by which seasons of business prosperity, crisis, depression, and revival come about in the modern world. The materials used consist chiefly of market reports and statistics concerning the business cycles which have run their course since 1890 in the United States, England, Germany and France. In chapter I Mitchell reviews 13 theories of the business cycle and admits that "All are plausible." He then puts them aside, arguing, To observe, analyse, and systematise the phenomena of prosperity, crisis, and depression is the chief task. And there is better prospect of rendering service if we attack this task directly, than if we take the round about way of considering the phenomena with reference to the theory. Mitchell's research strategy was thus quite different from that adopted by H. L. Moore or Irving Fisher who started from a hypothesis and went looking for evidence to support it. Moore and Mitchell offer another contrast in that, while Moore embraced the new statistical methods of correlation and regression, Mitchell found little use for them. Henry Ludwell Moore (November 21, 1869 - April 28, 1958) was an American economist known for his pioneering work in econometrics. ...
Irving Fisher (February 27, 1867 Saugerties, New York — April 29, 1947, New York) was an American economist health campaigner and eugenicist. ...
Thirty years later Mitchell was still working on business cycles and he published another large work, Measuring Business Cycles with A.F. Burns. This book presented the characteristic "National Bureau" methods of analysing business cycles. While Mitchell was still following the 1913 agenda, other economists had taken to studying the economy using models and even to constructing macroeconometric models. Against this background of Keynesian economics and the new econometric methods Mitchell and his project looked like dinosaurs.
While Mitchell's main creative efforts went into his empirical work on business cycles he was also a critic of conventional economic theory; some of his essays are reprinted in the volume, The Backward Art of Spending Money. The influence of Veblen is evident and Mitchell is usually categorised with him as an American institutionalist.
Mitchell's career as a researcher and teacher took the following course: instructor in economics at Chicago (1899-1903), assistant professor (1903-08) and professor (1909-12) of economics at the University of California, Berkeley, visiting lecturer at Harvard University (1908-09), lecturer (1913) and full professor (1914-44) at Columbia University. He was one of the founders of the New School for Social Research, where he taught for a time between 1919 and 1922, and of the National Bureau of Economic Research (1920), where he was director of research until 1945. There were interruptions for government service during the First World War and Mitchell served on many government committees; he was chairman of the President's Committee on Social Trends (1929–33). In 1923-4 he was president of the American Economic Association. Jump to: navigation, search University of California, Berkeley The University of California, Berkeley (also known as Cal, UC Berkeley, The University of California, or simply Berkeley) is a public coeducational university situated east of the San Francisco Bay in Berkeley, California, overlooking the Golden Gate. ...
Jump to: navigation, search Harvard University is a private university in Cambridge, Massachusetts, USA, and a member of the Ivy League. ...
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The National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER) is a private, nonprofit, nonpartisan research organization dedicated to studying the science and empirics of economics, especially the American economy. ...
Ypres, 1917, in the vicinity of the Battle of Passchendaele. ...
The American Economic Association, or AEA, is the oldest and most important professional organization in the field of economics. ...
The National Bureau was the institution through which Mitchell had greatest influence. There his important associates included Arthur Burns and Simon Kuznets. In his autobiograpy Kuznets acknowledges his "great intellectual debt to Mitchell." Arthur Frank Burns (1907–1987) was an Austrian-born economist. ...
Simon Kuznets Simon Smith Kuznets (April 30, 1901–July 8/9, 1985) was an economist who won the 1971 Bank of Sweden Prize in Economic Sciences in Memory of Alfred Nobel for his empirically founded interpretation of economic growth which has led to new and deepened insight into the economic...
Main Publications of W. C. Mitchell - A History of Greenbacks, University of Chicago Press, 1903.
- Gold Prices and Wages Under the Greenback Standard, University of California Press, 1908.
- Business Cycles, University of California Press, 1913.
- The Making and Using of Index Numbers, Bulletin of the US Bureau of Labor Statistics, 1915.
- Business Cycles: The Problem and its Setting, New York: National Bureau of Economic Research, 1927.
- The Backward Art of Spending Money: and other essays, New York: McGraw-Hill, 1937.
- Measuring Business Cycles (with A.F. Burns), New York: National Bureau of Economic Research, 1946.
- What Happens During Business Cycles, New York: National Bureau of Economic Research, 1951.
- Types of Economic Theory from Mercantilism to Institutionalism, ed. Joseph Dorfman, 2 vols. New York: Augustus M. Kelly, 1967. (Reconstructed from Mitchell's lecture notes).
There is a bibliography in the volume edited by Burns (below).
Discussions - Arthur F.Burns (ed.) Wesley Clair Mitchell: the Economic Scientist New York: National Bureau of Economic Research, 1952.
- Simon Kuznets (1949) Wesley Clair Mitchell, 1874-1948: An Appreciation, Journal of the American Statistical Association, 44, 126-131.
- Joseph A. Schumpeter (1950) Wesley Clair Mitchell (1874-1948), Quarterly Journal of Economics, 64,139-155.
- M. S. Morgan A History of Econometric Ideas, Cambridge 1990.
Morgan compares Mitchell's approach to business cycles with both earlier and later approaches.
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