Arthur F. Burns
Arthur Frank Burns (April 27, 1904 – June 26, 1987) was an American economist and diplomat who served as the 10th chairman of the Federal Reserve from 1970 to 1978. He previously chaired the Council of Economic Advisers under President Dwight D. Eisenhower from 1953 to 1956, and served as the first Counselor to the President under Richard Nixon from January to November 1969. He also taught and researched at Rutgers University, Columbia University, and the National Bureau of Economic Research.[2]
"Arthur Burns" redirects here. For other uses, see Arthur Burns (disambiguation).
Arthur Burns
Richard Nixon
Gerald Ford
Jimmy Carter
William McChesney Martin
Richard Nixon
Position established
Helen Bernstein
Columbia University (BA, MA, PhD)
President Nixon nominated him to succeed William McChesney Martin as Chairman of the Federal Reserve and later renominated him for another term. Burns was succeeded by G. William Miller when his second term expired. After leaving the Fed, President Ronald Reagan chose him to serve as Ambassador to West Germany in 1981, where he remained in office until 1985.
Early life[edit]
Burns was born in Stanislau (now Ivano-Frankivsk), Austrian Poland (Galicia), a province of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, in 1904 to Polish-Jewish parents, Sarah Juran and Nathan Burnseig, who worked as a house painter. He showed aptitude early in his childhood, when he translated the Talmud into Polish and Russian by age six and debated socialism at age nine.[3] In 1914, he immigrated to Bayonne, New Jersey, with his parents.[2] He graduated from Bayonne High School.[4]
At age 17, Burns enrolled in Columbia University on a scholarship offered by the university secretary. He worked in jobs ranging from postal clerk to shoe salesman during his time at Columbia as a student before earning his B.A. and M.A. in 1925, graduating Phi Beta Kappa.[5]
Academic career[edit]
Rutgers University[edit]
After college, he began teaching economics at Rutgers University in 1927, a role that he continued until 1944. Burns through his lectures became one of two professors, the other being Homer Jones, credited by Milton Friedman as a key influence for his decision to become an economist. Burns had convinced Friedman, Rutgers class of 1932, that modern economics could help end the Great Depression.[2][6]
In 1930, he married Helen Bernstein, a teacher.[3]
Burns pursued graduate studies at Columbia while continuing his lectures at Rutgers. As a doctoral student, he became a protege of Wesley Clair Mitchell, a founder and the chief economics researcher of the National Bureau of Economic Research. In 1933, Burns joined the NBER under Mitchell's guidance and began a lifelong study of business cycles.[2] He received his Ph.D. in economics from Columbia a year later.[7]
In 1943 he was elected as a Fellow of the American Statistical Association.[8]
In 1944, he left Rutgers and assumed the role of director of research at the NBER in 1945 following Mitchell's retirement.
Columbia University[edit]
In 1945, Burns became a professor at Columbia University. In 1959, he received the John Bates Clark endowed chair. At Columbia, he blocked the acceptance of Murray Rothbard's thesis on the Panic of 1819, despite having known Rothbard since the latter was a child.[9]
During his time at Columbia, Burns was elected a member of both the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and the American Philosophical Society.[10][11]
National Bureau of Economic Research[edit]
Beginning in 1933, the academic part of Burns's career focused on the measurement of business cycles, including questions such as the duration of economic expansions, and what economic variables rise during expansions and fall during recessions. In 1934, Burns wrote Production Trends in the United States Since 1870 his first major publication in the field.
Often, he collaborated with Wesley Clair Mitchell, whose research directorate role he assumed from 1945 to 1953. In 1946, Burns and Mitchell published Measuring Business Cycles, which presented the characteristic NBER methods of analyzing business cycles. During his tenure, Burns began the academic tradition of determining recessions, a role continued by the NBER's business cycle dating committee. Today, the NBER is still considered authoritative in dating recessions.
In the late 1940s, Burns asked Milton Friedman, then a professor at the University of Chicago, to join the NBER as a researcher of the role of money in the business cycle. Burns's detailed macroeconomic analysis influenced Milton Friedman and Anna Schwartz's classic work A Monetary History of the United States, 1867–1960.
Public service[edit]
Counselor to the President[edit]
Burns was appointed as Counselor to the President when Richard Nixon took office in 1969. The newly created position held cabinet rank and was meant as a placeholder until Burns could be appointed as Chairman of the Federal Reserve. Burns advised Nixon on economic policy during his brief time in the White House.[12]
As expected, Burns was appointed to replace the outgoing William McChesney Martin as Fed Chairman in November 1969 and resigned his post in the Nixon administration.
Federal Reserve Chairman[edit]
Burns served as Fed Chairman from February 1970 until the end of January 1978. He has a reputation of having been overly influenced by political pressure in his monetary policy decisions during his time as Chairman[13] and for supporting the policy, widely accepted in political and economic circles at the time, that Fed action should try to maintain an unemployment rate of around 4 percent.[14][15]
While Vice President Richard M. Nixon was running for President in 1959–1960, the Fed – under Truman-appointed chairman William McChesney Martin, Jr. – was undertaking monetary tightening, increasing the cost of borrowing and reflected in a recession by April 1960. In his book Six Crises, Nixon later blamed his defeat in 1960 in part on Fed policy and the resulting tight credit conditions and slow growth. After finally winning the presidential election of 1968, Nixon named Burns to the Fed Chair in 1970 with instructions to ensure easy access to credit when Nixon was running for reelection in 1972.[13]
Later, when Burns resisted, negative press about him was planted in newspapers and, under the threat of legislation to dilute the Fed's influence, Burns and other Governors succumbed.[16][17] Burns's relationship with Nixon was often rocky. Reflecting in his diary about a 1971 meeting attended by himself, Nixon, Treasury Secretary John Connally, the Chairman of the Council of Economic Advisors, and the Director of the Bureau of the Budget, Burns wrote: