1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Irving Fisher Should be REMEMBERED!, May 26, 2010
This review is from: Irving Fisher: A Biography (Hardcover)
That's the basis of my 5-star rating for this book, rather than the quality of the writing (pedestrian) or the research (hagiographic). Fisher, a professor of economics at Yale, was easily the best known economist in America during his lifetime (he died in 1947), the economic 'guru' of President Calvin Coolidge, the theorist who later economist Milton Friedman declared to be the greatest economic thinker in American history, a sophisticated mathematician, the man most widely perceived as the antithetical counterweight to English economist John Meynard Keynes. Fisher has remained an icon of neo-liberal economists -- not to be confused with liberals of social conscience -- monetarists, anarcho-capitalists, and others generally batched together as conservatives. Indeed, Fisher's solutions to the economic malaise that set in during GW Bush's presidency would be exactly the same as those of most Republicans today: minimal or no regulation of the Market Place, abolish income tax or at least pull its teeth, fund the government's proper defense of property by means of excises and fees, and privatize privatize privatize! Fisher was an ardent believer in the central function of the Stock Market, that is, to concentrate capital. He was so sure of the marvelous powers of the Invisible Hand that he pontificated on the "soundness" of the Stock Market just a few days before the Crash of 1929, in which, by the way, he lost nearly all of his own personal wealth.
But his influence in the 1920s extended beyond economic ideology. He was:
* The most prominent academic supporter of Prohibition and the Volstead Act. His ridiculously cooked statistics, "proving" that the income to various levels of government through fines and such more than compensated for the costs of enforcement, were seriously quoted again and again in Congressional debates. His role in the debacle of Prohibition is analyzed far more honestly in the book "Last Call" by Daniel Okrent than in this biography.
* A fervent eugenicist, secretary of the American Eugenics Society; his writings were always at least implicitly supportive of racist and anti-immigration extremism, and he refused to express opposition to the Ku Klux Klan.
* An opponent of immunization.
* A staunch believer in a theory called "focal sepsis", which asserted that mental illness was caused by infectious material in the teeth and bowels of the human body. He was such a firm believer in his theory that he had portions of the bowels and colon of his schizophrenic daughter removed by surgery, resulting in the girl's death.
Sound like anyone alive today? I have little doubt that his biography would be of interest to heavy partiers ... Tea Partiers, that is.
Help other customers find the most helpful reviews
Was this review helpful to you? Yes
No
