The Long and Unfinished Road to Friedman and Meiselman’s “The Relative Stability of Monetary Velocity and the Investment Multiplier”

Milton Friedman and David Meiselman’s 1963 article “The Relative Stability of Monetary Velocity and the Investment Multiplier in the United States, 1897-1958,” was one of the most influential studies to come out of the Keynesian-monetarist debates of the 1960s and 1970s. The gestation of the article, however, is shrouded with considerable inaccuracy and ambiguity. I use archival materials to provide a more accurate chronological ordering of the gestation of the article than has hitherto been available. I show that the gestation was subject to considerable delays because of Meiselman’s propensity to get side-tracked by other projects. I explain why a longpromised follow-up paper was never completed and why a book sequel to Friedman’s 1956, Studies in the Quantity Theory of Money, that had been planned as a co-edited work shortly after the appearance of the Friedman and Meiselman 1963 article, was not published until 1970 and was edited by Meiselman alone. 

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