Benjamin Anderson

Benjamin McAlester Anderson Jr. (May 1, 1886 – January 19, 1949) was an American economist of the Austrian School. When he was sixteen years old, Anderson enrolled in classes at the University of Missouri in his hometown and earned his A.B. in 1906. After receiving his bachelor's degree, Anderson accepted an appointment as professor of political economy and sociology at Missouri Valley College, where he remained for a year before becoming head of the department of political economy and sociology at the State Normal School (later known as Missouri State University) in Springfield, Missouri.

Anderson soon became a degree-seeking student again, this time pursuing his A.M. from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. He completed his master's degree in 1910 and finished his Ph.D. at Columbia University only a year later. Part of his dissertation was later published as Social Value: A Study in Economic Theory, Critical and Constructive.

Career After earning his doctoral degree, Anderson taught at Columbia University and then Harvard University. He left Harvard to join New York City's National Bank of Commerce in 1918.

He remained with NBC for only two years, however, before Chase National Bank hired him as an economist and as the new editor of the bank's Chase Economic Bulletin. It was during this time that the scope of Anderson's writing widened to include: ...articles critical of progressive policy in such diverse areas as money, credit, international economic policy, agriculture, taxation, war, government debt, and economic planning. He was a leading opponent of the New Deal and an enthusiastic supporter of a free market gold standard.

Academic influence Henry Hazlitt, who is often cited as having popularized Austrian economics in the English-speaking world, credits Anderson with acquainting him with the work of Ludwig von Mises and other Austrians. Explains Hazlitt:

According to Mises, Anderson was "one of the outstanding characters in this age of the supremacy of time-servers."

Outside of Austrian circles, though, Anderson's writings encountered a cooler reception from the then-dominant Progressives, who disagreed with his calls for reducing government intervention in the market. According to Henry Hazlitt, Anderson was dismayed by the popular political and theoretical trends that ran counter to the positions that he espoused:

Personal life Anderson was a skilled chess player and penned the preface to José Raúl Capablanca's A Primer of Chess (1935).

Publications Social Value: A Study in Economic Theory Critical and Constructive (1911) The Value of Money (1917) Effects of the War on Money, Credit and Banking in France and the U.S. (1919) "Cheap Money, Gold, and Federal Reserve Bank Policy" (1924). Chase Economic Bulletin, Vol. IV, No. 3, August 4, 1924 Economics and the Public Welfare: A Financial and Economic History of the United States, 1914–1946 (1949)