This book is an engaging and revealing biographical sketch of one of the most courageous economists of the 20th century, a man who faced down government and academic convention for decades, and established the nation's first independent research institution on economics. That man is Edward C. Harwood. This is an account of his amazing life and the core of his ideas by Katy Delay.
In 1932, Hardwood was teaching at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and published a book on business cycles that explained the onset of the Great Depression. The problem, he wrote, was not the market as such but interventions in the market in the form of excess credit expansion. He corresponded publicly with J.M. Keynes and became a leading proponent of an alternative view of the cause of economic crises.
In 1933 after President Roosevelt's first few months, Edward C. Harwood had concluded that some of the administration's policy recommendations were damaging to basic constitutional principles. President Roosevelt, whether well-intended or ill-advised, was steering the country into a New Deal that would endanger the principles for which George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, Samuel Adams, and James Madison had risked their lives.
Harwood could not remain silent and still call himself a man of honor. He established AIER in response, an institution dedicated to the fight for integrity, sound money, and free markets. The confrontations with Washington continued over the decades.
This biography is a documented account of his life and his main ideas.
American Institute for Economic Research, founded in 1933, was the first independent voice for sound economics in the United States. Today it researches and educates on the value of personal freedom, free enterprise, property rights, limited government and sound money. AIER's ongoing scientific research demonstrates the importance of these principles in advancing peace, prosperity and human progress.
