Benjamin M. Anderson

Benjamin McAlester Anderson. [Born] 1836. Economist.

Last year in this place I had the honor to read a memorial to Wesley Clair Mitchell, the great scholarly economist of his generation, who by wide and keen observation and analysis of social facts and by his unswerving fidelity toward eliciting their significance, gave the lie to Poincaré’s dictum that the social scientists had all the methodology but the natural scientists had all the results. When Mitchell could be turned aside to do a practical job he turned in a masterly result; but these were not welcome interludes in a life of inductive study.

The difficulty that some men, of other temperaments, have with Mitchell’s point of view is that economic decisions will not wait upon scholarly development: decisions have to be made now, every day; and one can only do the best that can be done with the facts, the theories, the feel for situations that one may have at the times when decisions must be made.

Such an economist was Benjamin Anderson, who was, during most of his professional life, economist to the Chase National Rank of New York and at the end of it Professor of Banking in the University of California

Anderson was a rare combination of abstract theorist and common-sense realist. He had a keen dialectical mind for economic theory in all its finer shades of abstraction; he also bad skill in the practical applications of theory to the facts of everyday life. Compared with Mitchell the scholar, he was a pamphleteer, but in the best 18th century sense. He lived a useful life, a courageous opponent of all inflationary policies, a warner against the makeshift nostrums of economic amateurs in high place. He combined with clear, rigorous and original thinking the gift of equally clear and forceful writing. He combined, also with a sure theoretical grasp of his subject, the realistic and detailed experience necessary for dealing with practical economic affairs. That steady practical judgment will be missed in the years ahead.

Source: Henry Allen Moe Papers, Mss.B.M722. Reproduced by permission of American Philosophical Society Library & Museum, Philadelphia

Henry Allen Moe
Henry Allen Moe Papers, 1949 Memorials