Contributions of Anna Schwartz

Eminent female economists are dying these days!

David Romer:

But to truly honor Anna, what you need to do is to go back to your university or wherever you work after the conference is over, and do work that’s so damn good that it changes the way we think about basic questions in macroeconomics, and that’s so damn careful and thorough that fifty years from now, it’s still the first place that people look when they want to learn about an issue that your work addresses. 

And, you’ll keep doing that work for decades. To put Anna’s research longevity in perspective, if you’re currently finishing your second year in graduate school, you’re probably about the same age that Anna was when she published her first paper. To match Anna’s research longevity, you’ll need to stay actively involved in important research until about 2080.

From City Journal:

Anna Schwartz must be the oldest active revolutionary on earth. Born in 1915 in New York, she can still be found nearly every day at her office in the National Bureau of Economic Research on Fifth Avenue, where she has been tirelessly gathering data since 1941. And as her experience proves, data can transform the world. During the 1960s, with Milton Friedman, she wrote A Monetary History of the United States, a book that forever changed our knowledge of economics and the way that governments operate. Schwartz put ten years of detective work into the project, which helped found the monetarist theory of economics. “Not only by gathering new data but by coming up with new ways to measure information, we were able to demonstrate the link between the quantity of money generated by the banks, inflation, and the business cycle,” she explains. 

Milton Friedman (himself!):

I have thought a great deal about what, if anything, I could say on the occasion of this conference that I have not already said, and there isn’t much. So I thought I would talk a bit about the problems of collaboration. That is a subject on which Anna and I both have a great deal of experience. We have collaborated with one another for over thirty years. It has been a remarkable experience, certainly on my part. During those thirty years, I do not recall any kind of personal acrimony or altercation, even though we had many differences of opinion about individual items. From my point of view, it was an almost perfect example of collaboration. Anna did all the work and I got a lot of the credit. How much more can you ask than that? That led me to think about the more general topic of collaboration, which I think is interesting, in part, because I have been very much impressed that the extent of collaboration, the number of papers in professional journals which are signed by two or three or four persons, is very sharply on the increase. I do not know why that is happening. I wish that one of you would construct a theory of the determinants of collaboration Historically, collaboration is a very rare thing in economics, especially in economic theory.... 

It has been a real joy and pleasure to collaborate with Anna over these years, because I always knew that everything she did was going to be done right. It was going to be precise, it was going to be accurate, it was going to be thoughtful. Moreover, both of us were prepared to change our views or to change what we had done or written if the other provided evidence that we were wrong or that there was a better way. In general, collaboration is a very intimate kind of thing. It only works if people have real confidence in one another, and respect one another’s integrity and one another’s competence. I certainly can say that I have been very fortunate indeed in that respect...