death_date birth_place nationality institution field birth_date article_title name alma_mater
28 april 1958 charles county , maryland united states columbia university econometrics 21 november 1869 henry ludwell moore
 henry ludwell moore johns hopkins university
henry ludwell moore

henry ludwell moore -lrb- november 21 , 1869 -- april 28 , 1958 -rrb- was an american economist known for his pioneering work in econometrics .
moore was born in charles county , maryland , the first of 15 children .
he received a b.a. from randolph-macon college in 1892 and a ph.d. from johns hopkins university in 1896 .
his thesis was on von thünen 's theory of the natural wage .
the visiting lecturers included simon newcomb and j. b. clark and he may have learned some mathematical economics from them .
while doing the ph.d. , he spent a year at the university of vienna .
at that time study in europe was quite usual ; americans often went to europe , usually to germany , for their entire graduate education .
moore was an early u.s. ph.d. .
his academic career proceeded through an instructorship and lectureship at johns hopkins , a professorship at smith college from 1897 to 1902 and finally to positions at columbia university .
he retired from columbia in 1929 due to ill health .
moore 's earliest interest seems to have been in the history of economic thought but in 1901 he turned to the project of providing a `` statistical complement to pure economics . ''
although he had studied with carl menger in vienna , his `` pure economics '' belonged rather to the marshallian and walrasian branches of marginal economics .
in 1903 , 1909 and 1912 , moore visited walras , pareto and bortkiewicz respectively .
to improve his knowledge of statistical techniques , he attended the lectures of karl pearson in 1909 and 1913 .
moore 's first book , on testing the marginal productivity theory of wages , was well received as a pioneering venture , although alfred marshall refused to read it , telling moore that `` it proceeds on lines which i deliberately decided not to follow many years ago . ''
moore wrote two books on economic cycles , in which the economic cycle is presented as a reflection of a physical cycle .
`` economic cycles '' argues that a rainfall cycle affects agricultural markets , which affect industrial markets .
`` generating economic cycles '' traces the rainfall cycle back to an astronomical cycle .
there is a strong family resemblance between this cycle work and the earlier sunspot research of william stanley jevons .
moore 's last book `` synthetic economics '' aimed to provide a statistical counterpart to walras 's general equilibrium theory .
with his contemporaries , wesley mitchell and irving fisher , h. l. moore pioneered new kinds of quantitative economics in the united states .
unlike them , moore was not a great public figure .
he was a private , sensitive person who suffered from long periods of illness .
at the end of his essay on moore , stigler writes `` in general one can say that moore was as much a founder of this movement economics as any one man is likely to be a founder of a great movement toward which a science has been steadily moving . ''
