The economics of Basil Moore: slow progress toward horizontalism

Abstract

While Basil Moore is well known for his view on endogenous money, very little is known about how he got there, and how his views might have evolved through time. This paper examines Moore's early views, pre-Horizontalists and Verticalists, and explains how Moore's views are rooted in a traditional Keynesian Tobin approach. But Moore's sabbatical at the University of Cambridge in 1970, when he met Paul Davidson and Joan Robinson, changed all that. Yet it would take him a full decade to fully embrace endogenous money.