Henry Ludwell Moore

Who was Henry Ludwell Moore?

Henry Ludwell Moore was an American economist known for his pioneering work in econometrics.

Moore was born in Charles County, Maryland, the first of 15 children. He received a B.A. from Randolph-Macon College in 1892 and a Ph.D. from Johns Hopkins University in 1896. His thesis was on von Thünen's theory of the natural wage. The visiting lecturers included Simon Newcomb and J. B. Clark and he may have learned some mathematical economics from them. While doing the Ph.D., he spent a year at the University of Vienna. At that time study in Europe was quite usual; Americans often went to Europe, usually to Germany, for their entire graduate education. Moore was an early U.S. Ph.D. His academic career proceeded through an instructorship and lectureship at Johns Hopkins, a professorship at Smith College from 1897 to 1902 and finally to positions at Columbia University. He retired from Columbia in 1929 due to ill health.

Moore's earliest interest seems to have been in the history of economic thought but in 1901 he turned to the project of providing a "statistical complement to pure economics." Although he had studied with Carl Menger in Vienna, his "pure economics" belonged rather to the Marshallian and Walrasian branches of marginal economics. In 1903, 1909 and 1912, Moore visited Walras, Pareto and Bortkiewicz respectively. To improve his knowledge of statistical techniques, he attended the lectures of Karl Pearson in 1909 and 1913.