Celebrating Irving Fisher: The Legacy of a Great Economist.

• Author: Formaini, Robert L.
• Position: Book review

Celebrating Irving Fisher: The Legacy of a Great Economist Edited by Robert W. Dimand and John Geanakoplos Oxford, U.K.: Blackwell, 2005. Pp. 456. $39.95 cloth.

Few American economists have the reputation Irving Fisher has--he is probably second only to Henry George as an economist of whom the American public was aware in the early twentieth century--and no other economist has undergone such dramatic reversals of fortune over time to achieve his reputation. Fisher's ideas and life seem, in some ways, stranger than fiction.

Celebrating Irving Fisher comprises, for the most part, the papers and comments originally delivered at a Yale University conference in May 1998. It contains two purely biographical essays: a reprint of James Tobin's essay on Fisher from the 1987 Palgrave Dictionary of Economics and a paper by William J. Barber from the Yale conference. Both make fascinating reading. Tobin stresses Fisher's mathematical bent, calling him "America's first mathematical economist" (p. 19). In this judgment, Tobin is no doubt correct. Fisher's methods put him constantly at odds with the rest of Yale's economics department throughout the first three decades of the twentieth century. "Much of standard neoclassical theory today," Tobin continues, "is Fisherian in origin, style, spirit and substance" (pp. 19-20). Fisher's colleagues in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries had been trained in Germany and had brought back to America the tools and attitudes of the German historical school. The most important American economists of the day formed the American Economic Association to further German-style theory and policy. Fisher was never a part of this movement because, among other reasons, he had traveled to England and Austria, meeting and absorbing ideas from such thinkers as Carl Menger, an ardent opponent of the German historical school, and Eugen von Bohm-Bawerk. He also met Vilfredo Pareto and Leon Walras in Lausanne and Francis Y. Edgeworth in Oxford (p. 47). Their influence on him is evident from his time-based interest theory to his use of general-equilibrium modeling and mathematical theoretical expression.

Fisher was always more than a theorist. Like other public intellectuals, such as the late Milton Friedman, he often engaged in supporting public-policy positions. Unlike Friedman's policy advocacy, however, Fisher's concerns--which ranged from good eating habits and life extension to public health, eugenics, and Franklin...