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Benjamin McAlester Anderson, Jr. (May 1, 1886 – January 19, 1949) was an American economist of the Austrian School.
Benjamin Anderson was born in Columbia, Missouri to Benjamin McLean Anderson, a businessman and a politician. When he was sixteen years old, Anderson enrolled in classes at the University of Missouri in his hometown and earned his A.B. in 1906. After receiving his bachelor's degree, Anderson accepted an appointment as professor of political economy and sociology at Missouri Valley College, where he remained for a year before becoming head of the department of political economy and sociology at the State Normal School (later known as Missouri State University) in Springfield, Missouri.
Anderson soon became a degree-seeking student again, this time pursuing his A.M. from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. He completed his master's degree in 1910 and finished his Ph.D. at Columbia University only a year later. Part of his dissertation was later published as Social Value: A Study in Economic Theory, Critical and Constructive.
After earning his doctoral degree, Anderson taught at Columbia University and then Harvard University.[2] During this time, he penned his Value of Money, a critique of the quantity theory of money.[3] He left Harvard to join New York City's National Bank of Commerce in 1918.
He remained with NBC for only two years, however, before Chase National Bank hired him as an economist and as the new editor of the bank's Chase Economic Bulletin. It was during this time that the scope of Anderson's writing widened to include
"...articles critical of progressive policy in such diverse areas as money, credit, international economic policy, agriculture, taxation, war, government debt, and economic planning. He was a leading opponent of the New Deal and an enthusiastic supporter of a free market gold standard."
In 1939, Anderson again entered the academic community, this time as a professor of economics at the University of California, Los Angeles. He held this position until his death (from a heart attack) in 1949.