Anna Schwartz

• 1. Introduction

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  Anna Jacobson Schwartz spent more than seven decades at one address in the world of ideas: the National Bureau of Economic Research in New York City. She arrived there in 1941 and never left. By the time she died in 2012, at the age of 96, she had written 9 books and more than 100 academic articles, and earned the description from Paul Krugman as "one of the world's greatest monetary scholars."

  She had graduated from Barnard College at 18, earned a master's degree in economics from Columbia University at 19, and published her first academic paper at 24. Yet her doctoral degree from Columbia did not arrive until 1964, decades after she had already co-authored work that would reshape how the world understood the Great Depression. How does a researcher build that kind of record? And what did she actually argue that mattered so much? Those questions are at the center of this documentary.

• 2. An Early Start

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  Barnard College graduated Anna Jacobson Phi Beta Kappa when she was just 18 years old. Her master's degree from Columbia University followed in 1935, when she was 19, and she began working as a professional economist one year later.

  Her first role was at the U.S. Department of Agriculture in 1936, followed by a position at the Columbia University Social Science Research Council from 1936 to 1941. That same year she married Isaac Schwartz, a financial officer who had also studied at Columbia. They would raise four children together, and their marriage would last more than 60 years.

  Her first published paper appeared in the Review of Economics and Statistics in 1940. Co-authored with Arthur Gayer and Isaiah Finkelstein, it examined British Share Prices, 1811-1850. The journal would later publish another landmark paper she co-authored with Milton Friedman, a detail that gives that first appearance a particular weight in hindsight.

• 3. The British Economy Project

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  The Growth and Fluctuation of the British Economy, 1790-1850 ran to two volumes and took a decade longer than planned to reach readers. Completed before the Second World War ended, it was not published until 1953. The study, co-authored with Arthur Gayer and Walt Whitman Rostow, became what scholars of the period describe as a monumental work and remains highly regarded today. The book was reprinted in 1975.

  Gayer had died before the first edition appeared. When the 1975 reprint was prepared, two surviving authors wrote a new introduction reviewing the literature that had accumulated since 1953. In it, they acknowledged what they called an "amicable divergence of view" about the interpretation of some of the book's findings. Schwartz was candid about where she had changed her mind: in the light of newer theoretical and empirical research, she had revised her views on the importance of monetary policy and on how to interpret interest rate movements. It was a sign of the intellectual honesty that would mark her entire career.

• 4. Friedman and the Federal Reserve

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  Arthur F. Burns brought Schwartz and Milton Friedman together. Burns was then at Columbia University and the National Bureau of Economic Research and would later serve as Chairman of the U.S. Federal Reserve System. Acting on his suggestion, the two economists set out to examine the role of money in the business cycle.

  Their collaboration produced A Monetary History of the United States, 1867-1960, published in 1963. The book placed primary blame for the Great Depression on the Federal Reserve System, arguing that changes in monetary policy had large effects on the wider economy. Robert J. Shiller has called it the "most influential account" of the Great Depression.

  The same year the book appeared, their article "Money and Business Cycles" was published in the Review of Economics and Statistics. They went on to produce Monetary Statistics of the United States in 1970 and Monetary Trends in the United States and the United Kingdom: Their Relation to Income, Prices, and Interest Rates, 1867-1975 in 1982.

  The chapter on the Depression was titled "The Great Contraction" and republished as a standalone book in 1965. Later editions carry a remarkable appendix. At an event held in Friedman and Schwartz's honor, Ben Bernanke, speaking as a Federal Reserve official, made this statement: "Let me end my talk by abusing slightly my status as an official representative of the Federal Reserve. I would like to say to Milton and Anna: Regarding the Great Depression, you're right. We did it. We're very sorry. But thanks to you, we won't do it again."

• 5. Price Stability and Financial Failure

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  In a series of studies produced during the 1970s and 1980s, Schwartz developed a position on financial regulation that set her apart from mainstream policymakers. Drawing on evidence from more than two centuries of economic history, she argued that price level stability is essential for the stability of the financial system as a whole.

  Her reading of the historical record led her to a striking conclusion: business failures, by themselves, do not have major consequences for the broader economy, provided their effects are stopped from spreading through the financial system. From that followed a second conclusion that proved deeply controversial during the 2008 financial crisis: individual institutions should be allowed to fail, not supported with taxpayers' money.

  In an interview with Barron's in 2008, Schwartz stated that injecting liquidity into markets and responding to the credit crisis with ad hoc programs were not the answer. She also criticized Ben Bernanke's support for bailouts and persistently low interest rates. After 2007, she had concentrated her research on U.S. official intervention in foreign exchange markets, using Federal Reserve data from 1962.

• 6. Recognition and the Long Career

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  The National Bureau of Economic Research was, for Schwartz, not simply a workplace but a vocation. She joined in 1941 and remained on its staff for the rest of her life, working in the New York City office through a broken hip and a stroke she suffered in 2009.

  The honors accumulated across decades. She was named a distinguished fellow of the American Economic Association in 1993, elected a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 2007, and served as president of the Western Economic Association International in 1988 and president of the International Atlantic Economic Society from 2002 to 2003. Eight universities awarded her honorary degrees, ranging from the University of Florida in 1987 to City University Business School in London in 2006. In 2013, the year after her death, she was inducted into the National Women's Hall of Fame.

  She also worked for years as an adviser to a monetary history project run by the Department of Banking and Finance at City University in London, commenting on papers, suggesting research directions, speaking to students, and presenting at academic conferences. Though she held formal teaching positions for only a short portion of her career, she mentored younger scholars through direct collaboration and by modeling, as the record shows, a scrupulous examination of the past.