Hostname: page-component-669899f699-tpknm Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2025-04-24T23:54:01.247Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

The Fall and Rise of Irving Fisher's Macroeconomics

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  11 June 2009

Robert W. Dimand
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Extract

The history of economics provides many examples of economists, such as A. A. Cournot, and J. H. Von Thunen, whose work became influential only long after it was written. Others, like Francis A. Walker, loomed large during their careers, only to fade in the discipline's memory. Irving Fisher's reputation has followed a much less common trajectory. Once the most cited monetary economist, the subject of major review articles and the center of controversies over theory and policy, Fisher lost the profession's attention, vanished from citation lists in macroeconomics, and was regarded as an embarrassment by colleagues in his university and his discipline. Then, after his death, his contributions to macroeconomics became increasingly cited and influential, as macroeconomics developed in ways that brought it closer to Fisher's approach. New approaches have been found prefigured in Fisher's work, as when a 1926 article of his was reprinted in the Journal of Political Economy in 1973 as “I Discovered the Phillips Curve” (Fisher, 1997, 8). Fisher was once caricatured in introductory textbooks as the supposed exponent of a constant-velocity version of the quantity theory of money, the exemplar of simplistic pre- Keynesian economics swept away in the Keynesian Revolution, but recently there has been attention to Fisher as, in Keynes's phrase, “the great grandparent” of The General Theory, “who first influenced me strongly towards regarding money as a ‘real’ factor” (Keynes, 1971-89, 14, pp. 203 n.; Dimand, 1995; Kregel, 1988).

Type
Articles
Information
Journal of the History of Economic Thought , Volume 20 , Issue 2 , June 1998 , pp. 191 - 201
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 1998

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

Article purchase

Temporarily unavailable

References

REFERENCES

Aldrich, Mark. 1975. “Capital Theory and Racism: From Laissez Faire to the Eugenics Movement in the Career of Irving Fisher,” Review of Radical Political Economics 7, no. 3, Fall, 33–54.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Allen, Robert Loring. 1993. Irving Fisher: A Biography, Blackwell Publishers, Cambridge, MA.Google Scholar
Deutscher, Patrick. 1990. R. G. Hawtrey and Modern Macroeconomics, Macmillan, London, and University of Michigan Press, Ann Arbor.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Dimand, Robert W. 1991. “Keynes, Kalecki, Ricardian Equivalence, and the Real Balance Effect,” Bulletin of Economic Research, 43, no. 3, Fall, 289–92.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Dimand, Robert W. 1993. “The Dance of the Dollar: Irving Fisher's Monetary Theory of Economic Fluctuations,” History of Economics Review, 20, Summer, 161–72.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Dimand, Robert W. 1994. “Irving Fisher's Debt–Deflation Theory of Great Depressions,” Review of Social Economy, 52, no. 1, Spring, 92–107.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Dimand, Robert W. 1995. “Irving Fisher, J. M. Keynes, and the Transition to Modern Macroeconomics,” in Cottrell, Allin F. and Lawlor, Michael S., eds., New Perspectives on Keynes, Annual Supplement to History of Political Economy, 27, Duke University Press, Durham, and London, 247–66.Google Scholar
Dimand, Robert W. 1997. “Irving Fisher and Modern Macroeconomics,” American Economic Review: Papers and Proceedings, 87, no. 2, May, 442–44.Google Scholar
Dominguez, Kathryn M., Fair, Ray C. and Shapiro, Matthew D.. 1988. “Forecasting the Great Depression: Harvard versus Yale,” American Economic Review, 78, no. 4, September, 595–612.Google Scholar
Fellner, William, et al. 1967. Ten Economic Studies in the Tradition of Irving Fisher, John Wiley & Sons, New York.Google Scholar
Fisher, Irving. 1997. The Works of Irving Fisher, 14 vols., general editor Barber, William J., assisted by Dimand, Robert W. and Foster, Kevin, consultant editor James, Tobin, Pickering & Chatto, London, and Brookfield, VT.Google Scholar
Fisher, Irving and Miller, O. M.. 1944. World Maps and Globes, Essential, New York.Google Scholar
Fisher, Irving Norton. 1956. My Father Irving Fisher, Comet Press, New York.Google Scholar
Garretsen, Harry. 1992. Keynes, Coordination and Beyond, Edward Elgar, Aldershot, UK, and Brookfield, VT.Google Scholar
Humphrey, Thomas M. 1971. “Role of Non-Chicago Economists in the Evolution of the Quantity Theory in America 1930–1950,” Southern Economic Journal, 38, no. 1, July, 12–18.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Humphrey, Thomas M. 1988. “The Trade Theorist's Sacred Diagram: Its Origins and Early Development, Federal Reserve Bank of Richmond, Economic Review, 74, no. 1, January/February, 3–15.Google Scholar
Keynes, John Maynard. 1971–1989. Collected Writings of John Maynard Keynes, 30 vols., edited by Moggridge, D. E. and Robinson, E. A. G., Macmillan, London, and Cambridge University Press, New York.Google Scholar
King, Mervyn. 1994. “Presidential Address: Debt Deflation: Theory and Evidence,” European Economic Review, 38, nos. 3–4, April, 419–45.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Kregel, Jan. 1988. “Irving Fisher, Great-Grandparent of the General Theory: Money, Rate of Return over Cost and Efficiency of Capital,” Cahiers d'Economie Politique, 14–15, 59–68.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Laidler, David. 1991. “The Quantity Theory is Always and Everywhere Controversial—Why?” Economic Record, 67, no. 199, 289–306.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Minsky, Hyman P. 1986. Stabilizing an Unstable Economy, A Twentieth Century Fund Report, Yale University Press, New Haven and London.Google Scholar
Moggridge, Donald E. 1995. “The Diffusion of the Keynesian Revolution: The Young and the Graduate Schools,” in Cottrell, Allin F. and Lawlor, Michael S., eds., New Perspectives on Keynes, Annual Supplement to History of Political Economy, 27, Duke University Press, Durham and London, 223–41.Google Scholar
O'Driscoll, Gerald P., Jr. 1977. Economics as a Coordination Problem: The Contributions of Friedrich A. Hayek, Sheed Andrews & McMeel, Kansas City.Google Scholar
Patinkin, Don. 1969. “The Chicago Tradition, the Quantity Theory and Friedman,” Journal of Money, Credit and Banking, 1, no. 1, February, 46–70.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Patinkin, Don. 1990. Irving Fisher, the Cambridge School, and the Quantity Theory, Korea Development Institute, Seoul.Google Scholar
Patinkin, Don. 1993. “Irving Fisher and his Compensated Dollar Plan,” Federal Reserve Bank of Richmond, Economic Quarterly, 79, no. 3, Summer, 1–33.Google Scholar
Rostow, Walt W. 1940. “James Harvey Rogers as an Economist,” in James Harvey Rogers 1886–1939: In Memoriam, The Overbrook Press, Stamford, CT, for Pierson College of Yale University, 13–28.Google Scholar
Ryan, Christopher K. 1987. Harry Gunnison Brown, Economist, Westview Press, Boulder, London.Google Scholar
Simons, Henry C. 1948. Economic Policy for a Free Society, University of Chicago Press, Chicago.Google Scholar
Steindl, Frank G. 1996. Monetary Interpretations of the Great Depression, University of Michigan Press, Ann Arbor.Google Scholar
Tobin, James. 1975. “Keynesian Models of Recession and Depression,” American Economic Review, Papers and Proceedings, 65, no. 2, May, 195–202.Google Scholar
Tobin, James. 1980. Asset Accumulation and Economic Activity, University of Chicago Press, Chicago.Google Scholar
Tobin, James. 1985. “Neoclassical Theory in America: J. B. Clark and Fisher,” American Economic Review, 75, no. 6, December, 28–38.Google Scholar
Velupillai, K. 1975. “Irving Fisher on ‘Switches of Techniques’: A Historical Note,” Quarterly Journal of Economics, 89, no. 4, November, 645–64.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Wilson, Louise L. 1964. Catalogue of Cycles: Part I—Economics, Foundation for the Study of Cycles, Pittsburgh.Google Scholar