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Irving Fisher
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1867-1947


When Irving Fisher wrote his 1892 dissertation, he constructed a remarkable machine equipped with pumps, wheels, levers and pipes in order to illustrate his price theory. This eccentric Yale economist remained an innovative tinkerer for the rest of his life - with physical things (making a fortune by inventing index card systems), social fads (an advocate of eugenics and health food diets) and with economic theory.

In the latter case, he has several claims to fame:

(1) his "Walrasian" theory of price (he invented the indifference curve) in 1892;

(2) his volumes on the theory of capital (1896, 1898, 1906, 1907, 1930) which brought the Austrian intertemporal theories into the English-speaking world;

(3) his famous resurrection of the Quantity Theory of Money (1911, 1932, 1935);

(4) the theory of index numbers (1922);

(5) the Phillips Curve (1926) (6) his debt-deflation theory (1933) which proved so useful to Post Keynesian economics.

Information on Irving Fisher

Major works of Irving Fisher

  • Mathematical Investigations in the Theory of Value and Prices, 1892.
  • Appreciation and Interest, 1896.
  • "The Role of Capital in Economic Theory", 1897, EJ.
  • "Precedents for Definining Capital" , 1898, QJE.
  • The Nature of Capital and Income, 1906.
  • The Rate of Interest, 1907.
  • The Purchasing Power of Money: Its determination and relation to credit, interest and crises, 1911.
  • "The Impatience Theory of Interest", 1913, AER.
  • "Is "Utility" the Most Suitable Term for the Concept It is Used to Denote?", 1918, AER.
  • "Economists in Public Service", 1919, AER.
  • The Making of Index Numbers, 1922.
  • "The Statistical Relation Between Unemployment and Price Changes", 1926, International Labor Review
  • The Theory of Interest: As determined by the impatience to spend income and opportunity to invest it. , 1930.
  • Booms and Depressions, 1932.
  • "The Debt-Deflation Theory of Great Depressions", 1933, Econometrica.
  • 100% Money, 1935.
  • Resources on Irving Fisher Irving Fisher's 1892 physical prototype of price model - Draft, First Version, Second Version.
  • Thorstein Veblen's essay "Fisher's Capital and Income" , 1908, Political Science Quarterly .
  • Veblen's essay "Fisher's Rate of Interest" , 1909, Political Science Quarterly .
  • Article on Prohibition - one of Fisher's "causes" Yale University - economics home page.
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