Benjamin McAlester Anderson, Jr. (May 1, 1886 - January 19, 1949) was born in Columbia, Missouri, the second of four children and only son of Benjamin McLean Anderson, a businessman and politician, and Mary Frances (Bowling) Anderson. He married Margaret Louise Crenshaw in 1909 and they had four children.

Anderson entered the University of Missouri in Columbia in 1902 and was awarded the A.B. degree in 1906. He was appointed professor of political economy and sociology at Missouri Valley College in Marshall in 1906 and was named as the head of the department of history and political economy at the State Normal School at Springfield the following year.

He went on to earn his A.M. degree in 1910 from the University of Illinois and his Ph.D. in economics from Columbia University in 1911. The prestigious Hart, Schaffner & Marx prize in economics was awarded to him in 1910 for part of his dissertation that was subsequently published in 1911 as Social Value: A Study in Economic Theory, Critical and Constructive.

Anderson served on the faculty of Columbia University for two years and then at Harvard for five. In 1917 he published a devastating critique of Irving Fisher's quantity theory of money, The Value of Money.  In 1918 he joined the National Bank of Commerce in New York City. His book, Effects of the War on Money, Credit, and Banking in France and the U.S., was published in 1919. Chase National Bank hired Anderson in 1920 as economist and editor of the influential Chase Economic Bulletin.   In 1939 he became professor of economics at the University of California at Los Angeles and was named the Connell professor of banking in 1946. He died of a heart attack in 1949 in Santa Monica, California just prior to the publication of his magnum opus, Economics and the Public Welfare: A Financial and Economic History of the United States, 1914-1946. (Biographical information courtesy of Mark Thornton O.P. Alford Resident Scholar, Ludwig von Mises Institute, Biography of Benjamin Anderson (1886-1949), http://mises.org/about/3226 accessed 7/29/2011)