Wesley Clair Mitchell

Heterodox Wesley Clair Mitchell (August 5, 1874 – October 29, 1948) was an American economist known for his empirical work on business cycles and for guiding the National Bureau of Economic Research in its first decades.

[2] Mitchell was born in Rushville, Illinois, the second child and oldest son of a Civil War army doctor turned farmer.

In a family with seven children and a disabled father with an appetite for business ventures "verging on rashness" a lot of responsibility fell on the oldest son.

Mitchell and John Whitridge Williams represented the United States at the World Population Conference held in Geneva, Switzerland in 1927.

Mitchell's thesis, published as A History of the Greenbacks, considered the consequences of the inconvertible paper regime established by the Union in the Civil War.

However this, and the follow-up study Gold Prices and Wages Under the Greenback Standard, transcended conventional monetary history of the kind Laughlin did and provided a comprehensive quantitative account of the behavior of the US economy in the recent past.

Mitchell's next project, which would occupy him for the rest of his life, was the study and measurement of the business cycle, which was then emerging as the big problem in economics.

The Preface begins: This book offers an analytic description of the complicated processes by which seasons of business prosperity, crisis, depression, and revival come about in the modern world.

The materials used consist chiefly of market reports and statistics concerning the business cycles which have run their course since 1890 in the United States, England, Germany and France.