|
Home > Conferences & Lectures > Homer Jones Memorial Lecture Series
 The
Homer Jones Memorial Lecture honors a man who exemplified the highest qualities
of leadership in economics and public policy. So much so, in fact, that after
Jones retired, a distinguished group of monetary economists—including Nobel
Laureate Milton Friedman—published a series of articles praising him and
the imprint he left on economics, monetary policy and the St. Louis Federal
Reserve Bank of St. Louis. This compendium was published in a 1976 issue of
the Journal of Monetary Economics.
As research director, and later senior vice president at the St. Louis Fed,
Jones (1906-1986) played a major role in developing the Bank as a leader in
monetary research and statistics. Before being appointed to the Fed position
in 1958, Jones worked at Rutgers University, the University of Chicago, The
Brookings Institution and the Federal Deposit Insurance Corp.
A measure of Jones's stature is the tribute paid to him by his former student
Milton Friedman, who attributes his own career choice to Jones's teachings and
encouragement. In particular, Friedman cites Jones's "integrity and independence
of character, his insatiable curiosity about the facts and his belief in the
power of repeated exposure to the facts that erode illusion." At times,
this independence of thought rubbed certain people the wrong way. Frequently,
as an article from Business Week
(PDF 16k) attests, those people happened to reside at the Board of Governors
of the Federal Reserve System in Washington, D.C. It was during Jones's tenure,
accordingly, that the Bank earned its reputation as a "maverick" in
the Federal Reserve System, often eschewing official doctrine for monetarist
explanations to macroeconomic phenomena. In time, however, the major tenets
of monetarism that Homer Jones and his successors at the Federal Reserve Bank
of St. Louis helped to formulate and disseminate became conventional wisdom
among mainstream economists.
|
