Dear all,
on behalf of Robert Hetzel, I share the sad news of the passing of Tom Humphrey on Sept. 16, and an obituary he wrote:


Robert Hetzel

October 18, 2023

Tom Humphrey: In Memoriam

Thomas MacGillvray Humphrey died September 16, 2023, at the age of 88, and is survived by his wife, Mitzi, an accomplished artist.  Tom earned a BA degree in finance at the University of Tennessee, where he met Mitzi.  He played college basketball and for a while pitched for a minor league baseball team.  All his life, Tom was a devoted runner and completed many marathons in a respectable time.  After serving as an army cryptographer in Germany after the war, Tom earned an MA degree at the University of Tennessee on the GI bill.  Tulane awarded him a PhD in economics.  In 1970, Tom joined the Research Department at the Federal Reserve Bank of Richmond where he served as editor of the bank’s Economic Review and established a tradition of excellence in writing English.


Tom was a classical economist to the core.  By allocating their time and resources to better their own condition, individuals give content to the Smithian “invisible hand” observation.  Namely, in a way coordinated by the decentralized operation of the price system in a free-market economy, they also allocate resources in a way that creates the wealth of nations.  The incentive provided by the desire of individuals to enhance their welfare implies that given time they sort out relative prices from money prices.  That fact limits the ability of central banks to act as master puppeteers controlling the real economy.  To allow the price system to work, they must control money creation to provide for price stability.


In a series of papers, Tom chronicled the history of the quantity theory of money over two centuries.  That achievement makes him indispensable to an understanding of central banking today and to the design of the optimal monetary standard.  Tom’s output was prodigious.  The following list of titles offers some idea of its extent.  Most of his papers are in the archives of the Federal Reserve Bank of Richmond Economic Review, available on the internet.  (See also https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thomas_M._Humphrey .)


“The Quantity Theory of Money: Its Historical Evolution and Role in Policy Debates;” “The Concept of Indexation in the History of Economic Thought;” “The Classical Concept of the Lender of Last Resort;” “On Cost-Push Theories of Inflation in the Pre-War Monetary Literature;” “Two Views of Monetary Policy: The Attwood-Mill Debate Revisited;” “The Monetary Approach to Exchange Rates: Its Historical Origins and Role in Policy Debates;” “Eliminating Runaway Inflation: Lessons from the German Hyperinflation;” “Adam Smith and the Monetary Approach to the Balance of Payments;” “The Real Bills Doctrine;” “Of Hume, Thornton, the Quantity Theory, and the Phillips Curve;” “Can the Central Bank Peg Real Interest Rates? A Survey of Classical and Neoclassical Opinion;” “Cumulative Process Models from Thornton to Wicksell;” “From Trade-offs to Policy Ineffectiveness: A History of the Phillips Curve;” “Lender of Last Resort: The Concept in History;” “Fisherian and Wicksellian Price-Stabilization Models in the History of Monetary Thought.” “Ricardo versus Thornton on the Appropriate Monetary Response to Supply Shocks;” “Nonneutrality of Money in Classical Monetary Thought;” “Kaldor versus Friedman in Historical Perspective;” “Mercantilists and Classicals: Insights from Doctrinal History;” “The Choice of a Monetary Policy Framework: Lessons from the 1920s;” “Monetary Policy Frameworks and Indicators for the Federal Reserve in the 1920s;” “Classical Deflation Theory;” “The Quantity Theory of Money;” Lender of Last Resort: What It Is, Whence It Came, and Why the Fed Isn’t It.”


Tom’s daughter, Elizabeth, finished Tom’s obituary with the following:


He was by turns solitary and sociable, gruff then good natured, eccentric but easygoing, sardonic and sweet, brusque and brilliant, sharp and sentimental, laconic and loving — a true idiosyncratic individual and old-school ‘absent-minded professor’ — full of character, contradictions and humanity.  There will likely never be another Tommy Humphrey, not in our lifetimes anyway, and we who remain in this realm are richer for knowing him.


Rest easy now, Tom.

Your race is run, you finished strong.

Godspeed you home.

We love you and miss you, until we meet again.

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Pedro G. Duarte

Senior Research Fellow

INSPER Institute of Education and Research