George Ernest Barnett was born on February 19, 1873, in Cambridge, Maryland, the eldest of the four sons of Edward Dilaha and Elizabeth Emma (Meredith) Barnett. His father was an ordained Methodist minister without a parish, preaching when called upon in Cambridge and the neighboring area.
After graduating from the Cambridge High School young Barnett entered Randolph-Macon College, from which he received the B. A. degree in 1891. In 1897 he became a graduate student in economics at the Johns Hopkins University, receiving the Ph. D. degree in February 1901.
He received an honorary degree in 1934 from Randolph-Macon College.
For several years thereafter he taught at Mocksville. His entire academic career was spent at Johns Hopkins, where, as a member of the department of political economy, he served successively as instructor (1901 - 04), associate (1904 - 06), associate professor (1906 - 11), and professor of statistics (1911 - 38). Barnett's scholarly contributions were primarily in the field of labor. These appeared in his own works and, through his inspiration and guidance, in a long series of monographs published as dissertations by his students. His interest in trade unionism and the process of collective bargaining was an interest in specific topics - the introduction of new technology, the growth of union membership, the changing pattern of wage negotiations - rather than in the general historical role and functioning of unions.
He preferred to base conclusions on empirical findings rather than on analytical models and found in trade-union documents and interviews with union officials the scope for his methodological bent. He viewed unions as an important factor in redistributing wealth and as a necessary part of an efficiently operating contemporary industrial society. When in the 1920's he grew pessimistic about the possibilities of collective bargaining he turned to legal enactment (particularly to social insurance) as the preferred means of solving most of labor's problems. Barnett's book on the printers' union - The Printers (1909) - has been a model for all subsequent writers on union administration.
Among his articles, those on the evolution of the joint agreement and the emergence of national unionism, published in May 1912 and May 1913 in the Quarterly Journal of Economics, are classics in the labor field. His Chapters on Machinery and Labor (1926) is a penetrating study of the economic nature of institutional factors. In recognition of his scholarly achievements he was elected president of the American Economic Association for 1932 and awarded an honorary degree in 1934 by Randolph-Macon College.
From time to time Barnett was called upon to undertake tasks outside his ordinary academic activities. During 1909-10 he was in charge of a study of state banks and trust companies for the National Monetary Commission; this had been the field of his doctoral dissertation, published in 1902 under the title State Banking in the United States. He served as chief of a division in the investigations of the United States Commission on Industrial Relations in 1913-14. For many years he was on the advisory committee of the United States Bureau of the Census. He was selected in 1937 by the Carnegie Corporation to make an investigation of labor arbitration courts in Australia. That undertaking was never completed. While in Australia he suffered a nervous breakdown; and, shortly after returning to this country, despairing of a return to full health, he took his own life at his apartment in Baltimore. He was buried in the family plot in the cemetery at Cambridge.
As a teacher Barnett was much admired and respected by the Hopkins students. Undergraduates were intrigued by his unique classroom illustrations; graduate students found great stimulation in his ability to see clearly, often from an unusual point of view, the interesting problems in the field and to deal with them lucidly and imaginatively. In his work with graduate students he was closely associated with Jacob H. Hollander. The two men were intimate friends, though they held strong opposite views on many questions.
Barnett, was an ardent "New Freedom" Democrat.
