Sumner Huber Slichter (1892–1959)

Between the Second World War and the end of the Korean War, Sumner Slichter was the arguably the most well-known economist in the United States. An expert on labour relations in the inter-war period, he helped identify a lack of investment demand as a cause of the Great Depression. Opposed to the government price fixing of the New Deal and peacetime deficit spending, Slichter broke with his Republican Party colleagues in advocating for employer cooperation in collective bargaining. The first Lamont University Professor at Harvard, he was president of the American Economic Association in 1941 and founded the Harvard Trade Union Program in 1942. Slichter’s popularity rose and fell with the labour movement. After 1945, he argued that a “creeping inflation” of 2% was a necessary evil for full employment under free enterprise, before falling into obscurity as macroeconomics congealed into its late twentieth-century form.