Moore Remembered for Contributions to Monetary Economics

Basil John Moore, professor emeritus of economics, passed away on March 8 at the age of 84.

Moore, who received his BA from the University of Toronto and his PhD from Johns Hopkins University, came to Wesleyan in 1958. He retired in 2003 after 45 years of scholarship that took him to Cambridge, Stanford, Morocco, Vancouver, Malaysia, the Philippines, Sri Lanka, Singapore, Korea, India, and Stellenbosch, South Africa.

During his distinguished career, Moore made numerous important contributions to macroeconomics and monetary economics and is renowned as the progenitor of the “horizontalist” analysis of endogenous money (an approach to money creation that states that reserves be provided on demand at rates set by central banks, rather than being managed by central banks). In addition to numerous peer-reviewed articles, Moore published An Introduction to the Theory of Finance (1968), Horizontalists and Verticalists (1988), and Shaking the Invisible Hand (2006), and his ideas have shaped the course of post-Keynesian economics.

His colleague, Professor of Economics Richard Grossman, said: “Basil Moore was a passionate challenger of economic orthodoxy. I met him during my first day on campus (we were both on our way to a freshman advising meeting) and he immediately suggested that we have lunch—mostly, I think, so he could evangelize someone fresh out of graduate school to his horizontalist view. Although I was never ‘converted,’ Basil’s gentle persuasion made me rethink a lot of what I held true about economics.”

Moore is survived by his wife, Sibs; his daughter, Tara; and his three sons, Robin, Martin, and Sasha; as well as his three Rhodesian Ridgeback dogs.