Arthur Frank Burns, 1904-1987

American Institutionalist economist and chair of the Federal Reserve in the 1970s.(not to be confused with his contemporary, Arthur R. Burns)

Arthur F. Burns was born in Stanislau, Austria and emigrated to the United States with his family in 1914.  Burns studied economics at the Institutionalist citadel of Columbia, obtaining his B.A. in 1925 and became a lecturer at Rutgers in 1927, while continuing his graduate studies at Columbia under Wesley C. Mitchell.  A.F. Burns joined the research staff of Mitchell's NBER in 1933 and obtained in Ph.D. from Columbia in 1934.  Burns co-authored the famous NBER study, the massive Measuring Business Cycles (1946), with Mitchell, one of the most definitive empirical works of the century.

In 1944, Arthur F. Burns joined the faculty at Columbia.  He took over Mitchell's role as director of research at the NBER in 1945, turning it even more decidedly towards the business cycle vein.  Burns interrupted his tenure to serve as the chair of President Eisenhower's Council of Economic Advisors from 1953 to 1956. Burns subsequently returned to academia at Columbia, until 1965, and served as president of the NBER from 1957 to 1967.

During the Eisenhower period, Burns developed a close relationship with vice-president Richard Nixon. When Nixon became president in 1969, he brought along Burns as his special counsellor. Nixon went on to appoint A.F. Burns as the Chairman of the Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System from 1970 to 1978. 

In economics, Arthur Burns is most associated with the business cycle vein of the American Institutionalist school.  Burns's remarkable conservative connections did not, however, prevent him from being almost a "liberal Keynesian" in practice. He was behind most of the demand management during the Eisenhower administration and, later during the Nixon reign, Burns was a constant advocate of incomes policies and eschewed strict rules in the conduct of monetary policy. It was Burns who effectively undertook the "stop-go" monetary policy of the 1970s which later led him to be succeeded by the ferociously monetarist Paul Volcker in 1978. 

Perhaps remarkably, Arthur F. Burns counted future Montarist founder Milton Friedman as his student at both Rutgers and Columbia, and Friedman's Chicago School counterpart George Stigler was one of Burns's junior colleagues during his Columbia years.  Although both of them retained a deep affection for their old professor, it did not prevent them from directing sometimes vituperative criticisms of Burns's management of the Federal Reserve in the 1970s.

After his retirement, A.F. Burns took a position at the American Enterprise Insitute, served as an advisor to Ronald Reagan and was appointed American ambassador to West Germany.

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