Anna Schwartz (1915–2012)

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Who They Were

Anna Schwartz (1915-2012) was an American economist known for her decades of work on monetary and financial history at the National Bureau of Economic Research. A meticulous empirical researcher, she spent much of her long career assembling and analyzing long runs of monetary data. She is best remembered for her collaboration with Milton Friedman, with whom she co-authored A Monetary History of the United States, 1867-1960, published in 1963. The book brought together roughly a century of data to trace the relationship between the money supply and economic activity, and it became one of the most influential works of twentieth-century economics. Schwartz continued to research and publish on monetary questions for decades afterward, and she is regarded as one of the leading monetary historians of her era, though the wider fame and the Nobel recognition tied to their shared ideas went to her co-author.

Key Contributions

Schwartz's central contribution was the empirical foundation of monetarism. In A Monetary History of the United States (1963), she and Friedman marshalled a century of data to argue that changes in the money supply are a primary driver of the price level and of economic fluctuations. Their reinterpretation of the Great Depression was especially influential: where Keynesian economists saw a collapse of private demand, Friedman and Schwartz argued that the Federal Reserve had turned an ordinary downturn into a catastrophe by allowing the money supply to contract by roughly a third between 1929 and 1933. This account made the case that monetary policy failure, not a failure of markets, deepened the Depression, and it reshaped debates over the causes of downturns and the proper conduct of central banks. Her careful data work gave monetarist claims much of their empirical weight.

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American economist and monetary historian who co-authored A Monetary History of the United States (1963) with Milton Friedman. Play the games that feature Anna Schwartz: