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This work has been selected by scholars as being cultur...)
This work has been selected by scholars as being culturally important, and is part of the knowledge base of civilization as we know it. This work was reproduced from the original artifact, and remains as true to the original work as possible. Therefore, you will see the original copyright references, library stamps (as most of these works have been housed in our most important libraries around the world), and other notations in the work.
This work is in the public domain in the United States of America, and possibly other nations. Within the United States, you may freely copy and distribute this work, as no entity (individual or corporate) has a copyright on the body of the work.
As a reproduction of a historical artifact, this work may contain missing or blurred pages, poor pictures, errant marks, etc. Scholars believe, and we concur, that this work is important enough to be preserved, reproduced, and made generally available to the public. We appreciate your support of the preservation process, and thank you for being an important part of keeping this knowledge alive and relevant.
George Frederick Warren was an agricultural economist and presidential adviser on monetary policy.
Background
George Frederick Warren was born near Harvard, Nebr. , the fourth son and fifth of nine children of George Frederick and Julia Calista (Stanley) Warren. Both parents were natives of Connecticut. After their marriage (1853) they had moved to Illinois and then, in 1872, to the Nebraska frontier, where the elder Warren took out a homestead in Clay County. Warren's youthful experiences on the family farm, where drought and grasshopper plagues did serious damage, did not sour him on rural life but may have contributed to his desire to improve the farmer's lot. And perhaps his later interest in monetary theory was stirred by his father's tales of his experiences in the California and Black Hills gold rushes.
Education
After attending rural schools and the nearby Harvard high school, Warren enrolled in the University of Nebraska. There he specialized in mathematics, graduating in 1897 with a B. Sc. degree. He then went to Cornell to study with the botanist and horticulturist Liberty Hyde Bailey, receiving the bachelor's, master's, and doctor's degrees in agriculture successively in 1903, 1904, and 1905.
Career
In 1906 he was appointed assistant professor of agronomy at Cornell. Farm management, or agricultural economics, was his major interest, and in 1910 he was made head of the new department of farm management. Warren's approach to agricultural economics was through agronomy and statistical analysis; his great contributions were in farm cost accounting, which he started, and in the promotion of farm efficiency through statistical analysis of the income of individual farms and groups of farms. Through his students and other contacts he collected financial data on the input and output of farms and hours of labor employed, and from these figures he calculated the labor efficiency of individual farms and of average farms for townships and counties. The "agricultural survey" thus introduced at Cornell became the basis of surveys conducted at other land-grant colleges and by the United States Department of Agriculture. Warren's land classification--likewise widely adopted, together with the statistical studies on which it was based--aided in determining what lands then in farms were not economically suitable for agriculture and might better be reforested, and also in predicting what lands could be more intensively farmed. Warren was frequently drafted into public service, both on the state and federal level. Later, under Gov. Franklin D. Roosevelt, he served on a state agricultural commission headed by one of his former students, Henry Morgenthau, Jr. During World War I Warren's study of prices enabled him to predict the postwar deflation in agriculture. Increasingly thereafter, with the aid of his younger colleague Frank A. Pearson, he concerned himself with compiling price indexes and statistical analyses of the marketing of farm products. His study of the relationship between the quantity of gold in the world and general price levels convinced him that the supply of gold in relation to the demand for it was the most important factor in the fluctuation of commodity prices. A shortage of gold meant a shortage of money, and this brought a fall in the general level of commodity prices; such a shortage, he held, was the basic cause of the depression of 1929. As a remedy he advocated the "commodity" or "compensated" dollar, a government-managed currency whose purchasing power in terms of commodities would be kept uniform by manipulating the price of gold (and hence the quantity of money) through government purchases of that metal. The general idea of a managed currency was shared by Prof. Irving Fisher of Yale and others, including even such a business group as the "Committee for the Nation, " headed by Frank A. Vanderlip. Warren himself through speeches and radio addresses had spread the concept widely among the farm population. In March 1933 the American Farm Bureau Federation urged the Warren monetary program on the incoming Roosevelt administration. For a time Roosevelt sought to halt the economic decline by other means. In October 1933, however, when earlier measures had failed to bring a lasting rise in prices and political pressure for inflation was mounting, Roosevelt decided to devalue the dollar in accordance with the Warren plan. After consulting with Warren and others, he raised the government purchase price for gold by successive steps to $35 an ounce, thus allowing the value of the dollar in terms of gold to fall to 59. 06 cents. Though the results failed to live up to Warren's predictions, Warren continued for several years to act as a consultant on monetary policy to the Roosevelt administration and to Senate and House committees. Warren was a prolific writer of bulletins, textbooks, essays, and lectures for farm audiences and professional economists. His Elements of Agriculture (1909) was in its sixth edition the year after it appeared and within twenty years had sold 421, 000 copies. It is an essentially practical text, designed for high school use, though it has been used in colleges as well. A companion volume, Farm Management, first appeared in 1913. Best known of Warren's writings are those relating to prices and the fluctuations of money, all written in collaboration with Frank A. Pearson: The Agricultural Situation: Economic Effects of Fluctuating Prices (1924), Prices (1933), Gold and Prices (1935), and World Prices and the Building Industry (1937). Stripped of pedantry and presented in a homely, practical way, they were understandable and convincing to the layman, if somewhat weak in theoretical exposition. Warren planned to retire as head of the department of agricultural economics at Cornell in 1938 and to devote himself to teaching and research, but death, caused by multiple tumors of the liver, overtook him. He was buried in East Lawn Cemetery, Ithaca.
Achievements
His land-classification studies made him a key figure in planning land use in New York State.
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Connections
On June 21, 1906, Warren married Mary Whitson, by whom he had six children: Stanley Whitson, Jean, Richard, George Frederick, Martha, and Mary. The sons followed their father in agricultural work, the daughters in home economics.
