Lloyd Wynn Mints | |
---|---|
Born | |
Died | January 3, 1989 | (aged 100)
Nationality | American |
Academic career | |
Field | Economics |
School or tradition | Chicago School of Economics |
Lloyd Wynn Mints (1888–1989) was an American economist, notable for his contributions to the quantity theory of money. [1]
Born in South Dakota, Lloyd Mints moved with his family in 1888 to Missouri and then in 1901 to Boulder, Colorado. He received from the University of Colorado his bachelor's degree in 1914 and master's degree in 1915. He was a secondary school teacher in Cripple Creek, Colorado from 1915 to 1917 and then moved to Washington, D.C. as an analyst in a federal office. In 1918 he was transferred to Chicago. In 1919 Mints enrolled as a graduate student at the University of Chicago, where he was assigned to teach undergraduate courses. He completed several graduate courses in economics and was promoted to assistant professor of political economy in 1923. He taught introductory economics courses until 1928 when he was put in charge of teaching money and banking courses. [2] He retired as professor emeritus in 1953.
The trio of Mints, Simons and Knight form the core of what many refer to as the 'Chicago School' of the 1930s and early 1940s. ... Mints provided a reformulation of the quantity theory which could stand against both the mainstream of the American economists over the first three decades of the twentieth century and the emerging Keynesianism of the late 1930s and 1940s. [1]
Mints was an advocate of the view that the Federal Reserve System should have increased the quantity of money during the years from 1929 to 1933. [3] Mints was also a main critic of the real bills doctrine in the 20th century. [4]
Mints had a strong influence on development of Chicago monetary economics, in particular on Milton Friedman's thinking. [5]
Monetary theory is a matter of paramount importance in a free-market economy, but, to the present time, banking legislation has been too much controlled, in the United States at any rate, by the belief that a restriction of the banks to the making of loans for bona fide commercial purposes will automatically provide for all needed variations in the means of payment. This belief, which I have called the "real-bills doctrine,"" is utterly subversive of any rational attack on the problem of monetary policy. If there is a central theme in what I have written, it is unsound in all its aspects.