Wesley Clair Mitchell
Born	(1874-08-05)August 5, 1874 Rushville, Illinois, U.S.
Died	October 29, 1948(1948-10-29) (aged 74) New York City, U.S.
Academic background
Alma mater	University of Chicago
Doctoral advisor	J. Laurence Laughlin
Influences	Thorstein Veblen John Dewey
Academic work
Discipline	Political economics Macroeconomics
School or tradition	Institutional economics
Institutions	NBER (1920–1945) Columbia University (1913–1944) UC Berkeley (1903–1912) University of Chicago (1899–1903)
Doctoral students	Simon Kuznets Arthur F. Burns Raymond J. Saulnier
Notable ideas	Empirical research onBusiness cycles

Wesley Clair Mitchell (August 5, 1874 – October 29, 1948) was an Americaneconomist known for his empirical work onbusiness cycles and for guiding theNational Bureau of Economic Research in its first decades.

Mitchell was referred to asThorstein Veblen's "star student."^[1]

Paul Samuelson named Mitchell (along withHarry Gunnison Brown,Allyn Abbott Young,Henry Ludwell Moore,Frank Knight,Jacob Viner, andHenry Schultz) as one of the several "American saints in economics" born after 1860.^[2]

Mitchell was born inRushville, 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 challenges, Wesley Clair went to study at theUniversity of Chicago and was awarded a PhD in 1899.^[3]

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 theUniversity of California, Berkeley, visiting lecturer atHarvard University (1908–09), lecturer (1913) and full professor (1914–44) atColumbia University. In 1916 he was elected as aFellow of theAmerican Statistical Association.^[4] He was elected to both theAmerican Academy of Arts and Sciences and theAmerican Philosophical Society in 1931.^[5][6]

He was one of the founders of theNew School for Social Research, where he taught for a time between 1919 and 1922, and of theNational Bureau of Economic Research (1920), where he was director of research until 1945.

There was an interruption for government service during theFirst World War, when Mitchell served as chief of price statistics in the planning and statistics division of theWar Industries Board, working withIsador Lubin,Walter Stewart andLeo Wolman.^[7][8] He later 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 theAmerican Economic Association. Mitchell andJohn Whitridge Williams represented the United States at theWorld Population Conference held in Geneva, Switzerland in 1927.^[9] From 1941 he was on the original standing committee of theFoundation for the Study of Cycles.

The National Bureau was the institution through which Mitchell had greatest influence. There his important associates includedArthur Burns andSimon Kuznets. In his autobiography Kuznets acknowledges his "great intellectual debt to Mitchell."

Mitchell has also made valuable contributions to thehistory of economic thought.

Mitchell was married toLucy Sprague Mitchell, a pioneering educator and the founder ofBank Street College of Education. He assisted his wife with the founding of the school.

Mitchell's teachers included economistsThorstein Veblen andJ. L. Laughlin and philosopherJohn Dewey. Although Veblen and Dewey did more to shape Mitchell's outlook, Laughlin supervised his dissertation. Laughlin's main interest was incurrency questions; he was a strong opponent of thequantity theory of money. The currency question facing the US in the 1890s was the choice between alternative monetary standards:inconvertible paper,goldmonometallism and gold/silverbimetallism.

Mitchell's thesis, published asA History of the Greenbacks, considered the consequences of the inconvertible paper regime established by the Union in theCivil War. However this, and the follow-up studyGold Prices and Wages Under the Greenback Standard, transcended conventional monetary history of the kind Laughlin did and provided a comprehensive quantitative account of the behavior of the US economy in the recent past.

Mitchell's next project, which would occupy him for the rest of his life, was the study and measurement of thebusiness cycle, which was then emerging as the big problem in economics. Hismagnum opus,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 by 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 byH. L. Moore orIrving 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 newstatistical methods ofcorrelation andregression, Mitchell found little use for them.^[10]

Thirty years later, Mitchell was still working on business cycles and he published another large work,Measuring Business Cycles withA.F. Burns. The book presented the characteristic "National Bureau" methods of analyzing 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 that background ofKeynesian economics and the neweconometric methods, Mitchell and his project looked dated.

Milton Friedman believed, "Mitchell is generally considered primarily an empirical scientist rather than a theorist." However, Mitchell's main creative efforts went into his empirical work on business cycles. Mitchell stated an endogenous theory, based on the internal dynamics of capitalism. Whereas neoclassical theories are deduced from unproven psychological axioms, he builds his theory from inductive generalities gained from empirical research. Also, he was considered a critic of conventional economic theory. As influenced greatly by Veblen, Mitchell is usually categorized with him as an Americaninstitutionalist.

• A History of the Greenbacks, University of Chicago Press, 1903.ISBN 978-0-548-15056-6^[11]
• Gold Prices and Wages Under the Greenback Standard, University of California Press, 1908.ISBN 978-0-678-00200-1
• Business Cycles, University of California Press, 1913.ISBN 978-0-8337-2407-6^[12]
• Mitchell, Wesley C. (November 1914). "Human Behavior and Economics: A Survey of Recent Literature".The Quarterly Journal of Economics.29 (1):1–47.doi:10.2307/1885296.JSTOR 1885296.
• The Making and Using of Index Numbers,Bulletin of the US Bureau of Labor Statistics, 1915.ISBN 978-0-678-00098-4
• Business Cycles: The Problem and its Setting, New York: National Bureau of Economic Research, 1927.ISBN 978-0-405-07608-4
• The Backward Art of Spending Money: and other essays, New York: McGraw-Hill, 1937.ISBN 978-0-7658-0611-6
• Measuring Business Cycles (with A.F. Burns), New York: National Bureau of Economic Research, 1946.ISBN 978-0-87014-085-3
• What Happens During Business Cycles, New York: National Bureau of Economic Research, 1951.ISBN 978-0-87014-088-4
• Types of Economic Theory from Mercantilism to Institutionalism, ed. Joseph Dorfman, 2 vols. New York: Augustus M. Kelley, 1967. (Reconstructed from Mitchell's lecture notes).ISBN 978-0-678-00234-6

There is a bibliography in the volume edited by Burns (below).Lucy Sprague Mitchell, Wesley Mitchell's wife, wrote the bookTwo lives; the story of Wesley Clair Mitchell and myself (New York, Simon and Schuster, 1953).

• Economic Cycle Research Institute

• History of Economic Thought: Wesley Clair Mitchell
• S. Fabricant: The Founding of the NBER
• Finding aid to the Wesley Clair Mitchell papers at Columbia UniversityRare Book & Manuscript Library

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