Correa Moylan Walsh Beyond Index Numbers: From the “Battle of the Standards” to the Science of Money

Abstract

In 1901, Correa Moylan Walsh gained renown for writing a groundbreaking monograph on index numbers. His contributions to monetary economics, however, though neglected, transcend his work on index numbers, which was conceived to serve more foundational concerns of his. Therefore, our aim is twofold. First, we want to recover Walsh’s role as an important early twentieth-century economist. Second, we intend to provide a wider account of his incursion into monetary economics. Our argument is that the cornerstone of Walsh’s approach to the science of money is not confined to index numbers but concerns his distinction between different kinds of economic value and the discussion regarding the kind of value that money should measure and store. As such, we identify Walsh’s 1903 book, The Fundamental Problem in Monetary Science, as his archetypical work.