Background
Wesley Clair Mitchell was born on 5 August 1874 in Rushville. He was the eldest son of a Civil War veteran.
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book
International Price Comparisons (Classic Reprint)
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/033180946X/?tag=2022091-20
A History of the Greenbacks: With Special Reference to the Economic Consciences of Their Issue: 1862-65 (Classic Reprint)
(Excerpt from A History of the Greenbacks: With Special Re...)
Excerpt from A History of the Greenbacks: With Special Reference to the Economic Consciences of Their Issue: 1862-65 Apologies must be made both for the bulkiness and for the fragmentary character of the following monograph. These defects are due to the same cause: an attempt to utilize all the well-authenticated statistical material bearing upon the subjects treated. The amount of labor entailed by this attempt was so large that I have been unable to carry the discussion beyond the first four years in the history of the greenbacks. Even within this brief period two impor tant topics are passed over. Nothing is said of the effects of the greenbacks upon foreign trade, and no comparisons are made between American and foreign experiences with paper money. The former topic is omitted from lack of time to get the refractory statistical data relating to it into significant shape; indeed, my dealings with the figures incline me to doubt whether any other than a speculative treatment is feasible. As for the latter topic, I soon discovered that foreign comparisons presented too large a subject to be dealt with as a side issue in such a monograph as the present. Moreover, the consequences of the abandonment of the specie standard in which I have been most interested are such as can be traced only when one has much fuller information regarding prices, wages, and the like than are available to the student of foreign experiments with inconvertible paper currencies. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.
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Gold, Prices, and Wages Under the Greenback Standard
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Business Cycles (1923)
(Format Paperback)
Format Paperback
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History of Prices During the War: International Price Comparisons (Classic Reprint)
(Excerpt from History of Prices During the War: Internatio...)
Excerpt from History of Prices During the War: International Price Comparisons Before beginning the comparison of price ?uctuations during the war in the United States and foreign countries it is desirable to get a. Clear idea of the ?uctuations in this country. Table 2 presents the index numbers for 1913 - 1918 prepared by the Price Section of the War Industries Board for All commodi ties Table 3 reproduces these figures and adds index numbers for the seven groups used in the classification. Fifty industries are included in these groups, and the total number Of commodities quoted is though for various reasons 103 of them are not directly used in making the index numbers. Every commodity included in the computation was weighted by the production plus imports in 1917, and in making aggregates for the groups and for 'all commodities the 50 series Of class aggregates were weighted again in proportion to the estimated selling value of the products represented. A description Of the methods employed, a fuller presentation Of the results, and a discussion of their significance may be found in the summary Of the History Of Prices During the War. (war Industries Board Price Bulletin N O. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0331673363/?tag=2022091-20
Wesley Clair Mitchell
Edit ProfileEducation
Despite material difficulties, Mitchell completed his college and graduate education at the University of Chicago, receiving his doctorate in 1899.
Career
Mitchell's main activities, research and teaching, were only briefly interrupted, mainly for government service. During one such interlude, in 1914, Mitchell wrote a highly influential monograph, The Making and Using of Index Numbers, for the United States Bureau of Labor Statistics.
Analyzing the Business Cycles Mitchell's major treatise, Business Cycles (1913), represents a pioneering effort to provide an "analytic description" of the pervasive and recurrent but also complex and changing fluctuations that are observed in the modern, highly developed, and interdependent "money economies".
He developed a concept of the business cycle as a self-generating process whose continuity and diffusiveness are due mainly to institutional responses of the economic system to a variety of unpredictable changes. The lags in these responses, for example, the lags of expenditures behind receipts, of selling prices behind buying prices, or of investment expenditures and deliveries behind investment decisions, are of strategic significance in the dynamics of the cycle. A central issue is the dependence of tides in business activity upon the prospects of profits or, as in times of crisis, the quest for solvency.
As cofounder, and from 1920 to 1945 as director, of the National Bureau of Economic Research, a private, nonprofit institution, Mitchell effectively promoted the testing of his ideas and findings, which was essential for understanding and solving many basic economic problems.
The first book that resulted from this reexamination was Business Cycles: The Problem and Its Setting (1927), which drew on a much larger mass of evidence than was previously accessible and which confirmed many of Mitchell's earlier impressions about the basic nature of business cycles and the methods appropriate for their study.
A full account of these methods was presented in Measuring Business Cycles (1946), a volume written jointly by Mitchell and Arthur F. Burns.
In his last major work, What Happens during Business Cycles: A Progress Report (published posthumously in 1951), Mitchell showed how the cycles consist not only of roughly synchronous rises and falls in many activities but also of numerous specific rises (falls) that start while expansion (contraction) is still dominant in the economy at large. This work paved the way for research on uses of cyclical indicators in the analysis of current business conditions and short-term forecasting.
Mitchell served by presidential appointment on national committees on social trends (1929 - 1933), cost of living (1944), and others. He had strong humanitarian sympathies and believed that advances in economics and other social sciences can and should help to reduce such defects of the economic system as recurrence of depressions and unemployment, inequality of opportunity, concentration of power, and material insecurity. Mitchell died on 29 October 1948.
Achievements
Works
book
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A History of the Greenbacks: With Special Reference to the Economic Consciences of Their Issue: 1862-65 (Classic Reprint)
(Excerpt from A History of the Greenbacks: With Special Re...)
-
History of Prices During the War: International Price Comparisons (Classic Reprint)
(Excerpt from History of Prices During the War: Internatio...)
-
Business Cycles (1923)
(Format Paperback)
- International Price Comparisons (Classic Reprint)
- Economic Essays in Honor of Wesley Clair Mitchell: Presented To...
- Gold, Prices, and Wages Under the Greenback Standard
-
A History of the Greenbacks: With Special Reference to the Economic Consciences of Their Issue: 1862-65 (Classic Reprint)
Views
Wesley Clair Mitchell was the follower of American Institutionalism and influenced mostly by Thorstein Veblen. Field – political economics, macroeconomics.
Membership
Wesley Clair Mitchell was the American Statistical Association, the New School for Social Research, the National Bureau of Economic Research, the President's Committee on Social Trends, the American Economic Association, the Foundation for the Study of Cycles, the Econometric Society.
Interests
Connections
Mitchell married Lucy Sprague in 1912.
References
- Wesley Mitchell (1874-1948, JOHN COMMONS)
- Wesley Clair Mitchell, 1874-1948
- Wesley Clair Mitchell: the Economic Scientist, Edited by Arthur F. Burns
- Economic Essays in Honor of Wesley Clair Mitchell: Presented to Him by His Former Students on the Occasion of His Sixtieth Birthday
- Two lives;: The story of Wesley Clair Mitchell and myself
- Wesley Clair Mitchell : The Economist Scientist
- Wesley Clair Mitchell: The Economic Scientist (General Series)
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Born
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Died
October 29, 1948 (aged 74) -
Nationality
American