Who is bagehot economist

OR: What were the truly contentious politico-economic issues on the boil as Bagehot was embarking upon his career? Grant: One was: what's money and who says so? Should the liabilities or the promises to pay of independent profit-making banks be money, or should money be defined entirely as gold and silver?

That was one question. One of the great questions of the age is encapsulated in a single word, Reform: who gets to vote? Should it be only property holders of a certain amount with a certain amount of income or should it be most everybody?

Should women vote, as John Stuart Mill shockingly suggested? Another question was religious inclusion. Bagehot confronted this himself, as his father was a Unitarian. Bagehot was more or less a Church of England man. I say more or less because it wasn't quite clear what he believed. But he was prohibited by his father from applying to Oxford or Cambridge because those schools had religious tests.

You had to sign off on the 39 articles of faith of the Church of England in order to be eligible to be admitted. Grant: Bagehot was an establishmentarian. He was of his age, as the quote from Young underscores. He was very much against the enthusiasms of the age, including the radical views of Karl Marx.

I'm not sure if he ever engaged with Marx or his ideas by name. But he certainly would have not accepted them as valid. He was the son-in-law of James Wilson, one of the champions of free trade. Bagehot too, certainly as editor of The Economist , was all for free trade.

He was not for the leveling of society. He was not for the inclusion of all in the body politic. He was for gold and silver. They alone were money in Bagehot's view. Every banknote, whether it was from the Bank of England or whether it was from his own family bank, Stuckey's, were debt obligations.

They were notes. A note is promise to pay what? Wooldridge co-authored several books with his friend John Micklethwait, who is now editor-in-chief of Bloomberg News. When he was editor of the Economist, Micklethwait introduced a column on business called Schumpeter, named after the great Austrian-American economist.

To date, Wooldridge has been its author, but he is doing his last Schumpeter column for the forthcoming Christmas issue. He will then take three months off to write a book, starting as Bagehot in April.

Hutton, editor , Biographical Studies , The Postulates of English Political Economy , [ bk ]. Walter Bagehot and an alternative proposal to the one-pound note scheme of Mr.