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THE LONG AND UNFINISHED ROAD TO FRIEDMAN AND MEISELMAN’S “THE RELATIVE STABILITY OF MONETARY VELOCITY AND THE INVESTMENT MULTIPLIER”

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  11 December 2023

George S. Tavlas
George S. Tavlas*
Affiliation:
George S. Tavlas: Bank of Greece, and the Hoover Institution, Stanford University.
*
Correspondence may be addressed to George Tavlas, Bank of Greece, 21 E Venizelos Ave, Athens, 10250, Greece, Tel. no. +30 210 320 2370; Fax. no. +30 210 320 2432; Email address: gtavlas@bankofgreece.gr.
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Abstract

Milton Friedman and David Meiselman’s 1963 article, “The Relative Stability of Monetary Velocity and the Investment Multiplier in the United States, 1897–1958,” was one of the most influential studies to come out of the Keynesian-monetarist debates of the 1960s and 1970s. The gestation of the article, however, is shrouded with considerable inaccuracy and ambiguity. I use archival materials to provide a more accurate chronological ordering of the gestation of the article than has hitherto been available. I show that the gestation was subject to considerable delays. I provide reasons that explain why a long-promised follow-up paper was never completed and why a book sequel to Friedman’s 1956 Studies in the Quantity Theory of Money, planned as a co-edited work shortly after the appearance of the Friedman and Meiselman 1963 article, was not published until 1970 and was edited by Meiselman alone.

Type
Article
Information
Journal of the History of Economic Thought , Volume 46 , Issue 2 , June 2024 , pp. 201 - 224
Copyright
© The Author(s), 2023. Published by Cambridge University Press on behalf of History of Economics Society

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Footnotes

I have benefitted from valuable comments by Pedro Duarte, the editor of this journal, and by Michael Belongia, Harris Dellas, Stephen G. Hall, Robert Hetzel, Peter Ireland, David Laidler, Ed Nelson, and two referees.

I thank Maria Monopoli for superb research assistance. I am grateful to David H. Sun and the staff of the Hoover Institution Library & Archives for their assistance.

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