FRIEDMAN (Milton).
Wesley C. Mitchell as an Economic Theorist.
A substantial appraisal of the economic thought of Wesley Clair Mitchell (1874-1948), Friedman’s senior colleague at the National Bureau of Economic Research and Columbia University who had passed away two years earlier. Mitchell was best-known for his large-scale empirical research and assiduous data collection, but in the present article Friedman insisted that ‘Mitchell was much more insightful as a theorist than his reputation suggested. Friedman evidently took his cue from Arthur Burns’ remark, ‘I venture the prophecy that if Mitchell’s homely work of (1913) were translated into the picturesque vocabulary of ‘propensities’, ‘multipliers’, ‘acceleration coefcients’ and the like, it would create a sensation in the theoretical world’. In taking that cue, Friedman described Mitchell’s work in terms of an income-expenditure framework, starting with ‘Y = C + I’, and including a multiplier relation. Mitchell, it was noted accepted that over long periods, prices vary with the quantity of money, but that money was not the primary stimulus to shorter-term changes, and in Friedman’s rendering, the argument was even put in the language of ‘liquidity preference’ and to judge by this piece alone, Friedman seems quite content with the Keynesian framework, as well as with its terminology’ (Forder, Milton Friedman, p. 119).
