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Howard S. Ellis, 1898-1992.
Monetary theorist at UC Berkeley.
Originally from Denver, Colorado, Howard Sylvester Ellis obtained his BA at Iowa in 1920, and went on to obtain his MA from Michigan in 1922. He studied a year abroad at Heidelberg in 1924, and returned in 1925 to take a job as an instructor in Michigan. Ellis went on to pursue further graduate studies at Harvard. Ellis obtained his Ph.D. from Harvard in 1929 under Taussig, with a dissertation on German monetary theory that won the Ricardo prize (eventually published in 1934).
Howard S. Ellis taught at the University of Michigan from until 1938, when he moved the University of California-Berkeley in 1938. During WWII, Ellis served as economic research analyst at the Federal Reserve in Washington DC (1943-46), and subsequently returned to Berkeley.
While sympathetic to the Keynesian Revolution (e.g. 1949), Howard S. Ellis did not exactly subscribe to it. He was critical of theory of liquidity preference (e.g. 1938) and was quite critical of Alvin Hansen's "secular stagnation" thesis (e.g. 1940). In Ellis's view, stagnation resulted mostly from institutional barriers to investment (e.g. monopolies, high tariffs, price controls, regulations, etc.), and excessively tight monetary policy that kept interest rates too high. He agreed with Keynesians on a central role for active fiscal policy in cyclical fluctuations, but believed the promotion of competition and active monetary policy (which he felt Keynesians overlooked) would be quite effective in promoting full employment and growth.
Ellis was a critic of US interwar trade policy, and his 1945 essay against "bilateralism" was instrumental in setting US post-war policy turn towards multi-lateral trade agreements like GATT.
Ellis edited the famous AEA collection A Survey of Contemporary Economics in 1948, hoping to summarize the state of economic theory in a manner accessible to non-specialists (perhaps the last time such may have been possible). Ellis became president of the AEA the next year. Ellis's presidential address to the AEA (1950) presented his middle-of-the-road views on the balance between individualism and planning.
Ellis's 1950 Economics of Freedom, written with the assistance Ragnar Nurske, Vera Smith Lutz and others, was a comprehensive explanation and defense of the Marshall Plan.
In the post-war era, Ellis became more interested and involved in development economics. His Approaches (1955) with Norman Buchanan was an attempt to survey the state of early development theory. Ellis became involved in the growth controversy in development economics. In 1965, Ellis formed the so-called "Berkeley Group", which worked with the newly-formed planning agency IPEA in Brazil during difficult years for the Brazilian economy.
Ellis retired from Berkeley in 1965. He was later associated with the AEI.
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