Wesley Clair Mitchell

Heterodox

Wesley Clair Mitchell August 5, 1874 – October 29, 1948 was an American economist call for his empirical gain on business cycles & for guiding the National Bureau of Economic Research in its first decades.

Mitchell was covered to as Thorstein Veblen's "star student."

Paul Samuelson named Mitchell along with Harry Gunnison Brown, Allyn Abbott Young, Henry Ludwell Moore, Frank Knight, Jacob Viner, as alive as Henry Schultz as one of a several "American saints in economics" born after 1860.

Biography

Mitchell was born in Rushville, Illinois, thechild and oldest son of a Civil War army doctor turned farmer. In a line with seven children and a disabled father with an appetite for chain ventures "verging on rashness" a lot of responsibility fell on the oldest son. Despite these challenges, Wesley Clair went to explore at the University of Chicago and was awarded a PhD in 1899.

Mitchell's career as a researcher and teacher took the coming after or as a sum of. course: instructor in economics at Chicago 1899–1903, assistant professor 1903–08 and professor 1909–12 of economics at the University of California, Berkeley, visiting lecturer at Harvard University 1908–09, lecturer 1913 and full professor 1914–44 at Columbia University. In 1916 he was elected as a Fellow of the American Statistical Association.

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

There were interruptions for government service during the First World War and Mitchell 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 the American Economic Association. Mitchell and John Whitridge Williams represented the United States at the World Population Conference held in Geneva, Switzerland in 1927. From 1941 he was on the original standing committee of the Foundation for the study of Cycles.

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

Mitchell has also produced valuable contributions to the history of economic thought.

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