I am sorry to report that Roger W. Garrison passed away last month, at the age of 82. Roger was one of the foremost authorities on the Austrian Theory of the Business Cycle, culminating in his great book Time and Money: The Macroeconomics of Capital Structure (Routledge (2001). His interest in Austrian macroeconomics and its superiority to Keynesian macroeconomics first became apparent in a paper he wrote in 1973 on the topic. After he sent a copy to Murray Rothbard, Joey Rothbard called him and invited him to visit Murray in New York. Murray was so impressed with him that he was invited to the legendary South Royalton conference in 1974, which played a key role in the revival of Austrian economics. Continuing his study of Austrian economics, he finished a Ph.D. at the University of Virginia under Leland Yeager. He taught at Auburn University from 1978 until his retirement and supervised many students who became leading Austrian economists themselves.
I first met Roger in 1979 and saw him often at Mises conferences, and I was especially impressed by his analytic intelligence, accompanied by a dry wit. He once criticized a popular econometric concept called “Grainger causation” by contrasting it with “Webster causation” and said about another person who had come into his critical sights that “he doesn’t know a damn thing about economics.” Nothing could get him excited as talking about his collection of old cars. I will miss him.
