Morris Albert Copeland

Life Born and raised in Rochester New York, Copeland began his university education at Amherst with an interest in philosophy and Greek. Late in his undergraduate studies he encountered teachers Walter W. Stewart and Walton Hamilton and became fascinated with social accounting and economics. After graduating in 1917 he went on to the University of Chicago for his graduate studies where he came under the influence of Wesley Mitchell, a man who he came to regard as his mentor and good friend. After his doctoral thesis on institutional theory of value supervised by John Maurice Clark, Copeland emerged as an "unreconstructed institutionalist".

After receiving his Ph.D. in 1921, Copeland began teaching economics at Cornell and became a full professor in 1928.

Contributions to economics Copeland shared the institutionalist skepticism of "economic laws" that purport to be applicable outside of specific historical institutional contexts. He viewed orthodox theory more as expressions of doctrine rather than empirical observation. For example, he saw the quantity theory of money as a mathematical device convenient for neoclassical doctrine rather than as a hypothesis that emerged from solid empirical observation of economic data. Rather than base economics on introspection and mental states that cannot be empirically verified, he wished to engage in what he viewed as a more science-based approach which necessarily proceeds first from observations about an economy's actual behavior. While organizing principles might be inferred from such observations, the institutionalist perspective was that they are in constant flux and subject to a broader social context. For this reason Copeland published not just in economic publications, but in journals of philosophy, political science, psychology, statistics and accounting. In 1949 he introduced his quadruple entry principle - a scheme enlarged on by Hyman Minsky to emphasize the time-dated pattern of cash commitments to examine the microeconomic basis of financial system instability. Copeland further developed and applied his perspective in his book "A Study of Moneyflows in the United States". According to Copeland, when you look at the economy from the micro perspective of money flows, it provides a powerful new way making phenomena visible that are simply abstracted away by the orthodox Keynesian and Monetarist models. Copeland's flow of funds set of accounts provides an alternative framework and analytical insights that is unavailable from either the Keynesian NIPA framework or the monetarist quantity theory of money framework. His framework was later developed into Stock-flow consistent models.

For his innovations in money flow theory, many colleagues believed that Copeland should have received the Nobel Prize. In 1944, Copeland joined Mitchell at the National Bureau of Economic Research in order to work on money flows research, which after 1947 was continued under the auspices of the Federal Reserve. According to Jacob Cohen who in 1972 performed a review of money flow analysis since 1947, "the breadth of Copeland's moneyflows has been substantially narrowed in the hands of the Federal Reserve and foreign account-makers." As part of its integration into the National Income and Product Accounts system, John Dawson observes that Copeland's flow of funds analysis was compromised by removal of his money circuit calculations.

Publications (1949) "Social Accounting for Moneyflows." The Accounting Review 24(3): 254–264. (1952) A Study in Moneyflows in the United States, National Bureau of Economic Research/ Arno Press (1958) Fact and Theory in Economics: The Testimony of an Institutionalist, University of Michigan/Cornell University Press (1961) "Trends in Government Financing." National Bureau of Economic Research (1964) Our Free Enterprise Economy. Collier Macmillan (1966) Toward Full Employment in our Free Enterprise Economy. University of Michigan/Fordham University Press (1981) Essays in Socioeconomic Evolution. Vantage Press