Leland Bennett Yeager: 1924-2018.

• Author: Koppl, Roger G.
• Position: Biography

Leland Yeager died quietly at home on April 23, 2018. With his passing went a great mind, a great teacher, and a beloved friend.

Yeager, who was born in Oak Park, Illinois, in 1924, received his Ph.D. in economics from Columbia. He taught for five years at the University of Maryland before moving to the University of Virginia, where he taught for nearly thirty years and was eventually named Paul Goodloe McIntire Professor. After retiring from Virginia, Yeager was named Ludwig von Mises Distinguished Professor of Economics at Auburn University, where he stayed until his retirement in 1995. Along the way, he was a visiting professor at Southern Methodist University, University of California at Los Angeles, New York University, and George Mason University. Yeager was president of the Southern Economic Association (1974-75) and the Atlantic Economic Society (1994-95); an adjunct scholar with the American Enterprise Institute and the Cato Institute; a fellow with the American Association for the Advancement of Science; a member of the Mont Pelerin Society; and director and president of Interlingua Institute and of Union Mundial pro Interlingua.

When Yeager was in high school, his history teacher, Miss Conner, suggested that he take the Henry George School's correspondence course on George's book Progress and Poverty (1879). After finishing that course, he took the course on Protection or Free Trade (1886). By the time he enlisted in the army at the age of eighteen, he was a convinced, even passionate, Georgist. He served in the U.S. Army as a Japanese cryptanalytic translator during World War II. I once asked him about this work and his knowledge of Japanese. He gave an evasive answer, modestly but implausibly suggesting that his war work required little or no knowledge of the Japanese language. After the war, Yeager enrolled in Oberlin College. He majored in economics, convinced that he already knew its essentials. There, and especially in graduate school, he learned that there was much more to economics that fascinated him. "I still greatly admire Henry George," he once told me, "although I am no longer a single-taxer."

Yeager's doctoral dissertation at Columbia, "An Evaluation of Freely-Fluctuating Exchange Rates," was written under the joint supervision of James W. Angeli and Ragnar Nurkse. The "genealogy" of Yeager's teachers suggests ties to both the Austrian School of economics and the Chicago tradition of Frank Knight. Angeli had studied under F. W. Taussig and under Frank Knight's teacher, Allyn Abbot Young. Nurkse had studied in Vienna, where he came under the influence of Ludwig von Mises, Oskar Morgenstern, and especially Gottfried Haberler, who became Nurkse's life-long friend.

Yeager's connections to the Austrian tradition extend well beyond the indirect connection through Nurkse. In a talk given in 2012 (Yeager 2012), Yeager explained Ludwig von Mises's influence on him. In 1947, while still an undergraduate, he encountered two books by Mises: Bureaucracy (1944a) and Omnipotent Government (1944b). From the former, he got an understanding of how profit-and-loss considerations guide decisions in a firm, in contrast with the more procedural or rule-bound guidance required for organizations that do not seek money profits. Yeager knew in 1949 that Mises's book Human Action would soon be published, and when it came out in September of that year, he bought a copy and read it. In November 1949, he gave a faculty seminar at Texas A&M on the socialist calculation debate, and the lecture was published unchanged (aside from updating citations) in 2011 as "The Debate about the Efficiency of a Socialist Economy." This essay reveals a deep appreciation for the argument Peter Boettke has dubbed "the contribution of twentieth-century Austrian economics to political economy" (1998, 132, emphasis in original). While still a graduate student at Columbia University, Yeager wrote to Mises and asked to meet him. This letter led to an invitation to come to Mises's Manhattan apartment and discuss ideas. Yeager also took a two-week seminar with Mises on monetary theory. Yeager and Mises grew close enough to have "exchanged Christmas cards for a few years." Later, Yeager would translate Mises's book Nation, State, and, Economy into English (Mises 1983).

Between the two-week seminar and his prior reading of Mises's works, Yeager developed the basics of his cash-balances approach to monetary theory, which may also be called the monetary disequilibrium theory. In this theory, the logic of the quantity theory of money is preserved but "not interpreted as some mechanical relation" (Yeager 2012). And purchasing power parity is treated similarly. "The key idea is that there is," Yeager explained, "such a thing as a demand for cash balances to be held and a quantity of cash balances, money, to be held. And what happens if the quantity demanded and quantity supplied are not equal?" (Yeager 2012). When Yeager asked his teacher, the monetary theorist James Angeli, what happens in monetary...