Irving Fisher

chronicle 20. 1Irving Fisher(1867 -1947) Irving Fisher was born at Saugerties, New York, the son of a Congregational minister. As did his father, Fisher studied at Yale. Mathematics was his favorite subject. He won first prize in a math contest even as a freshman his doctoral dissertation,Mathematical Investigations in the guess of Value and Prices(1892), was a landmark in the development of numeral economics. This dissertation won immediate cheers from no lesser figures than Francis Y.Edgeworth and Vilfredo Pareto, two renowned economists. Some 55 years later, Ragnar Frisch (eventual winner of the 1969 Nobel Prize in Economic Science) would say about Fisher He has been anywhere from a decade to two generations earlier of his while . it will be hard to find any single work that has been more prestigious than Fishers dissertation. It is no wonder that Fisher was a full professor of political economy at Yale at heart seven years of graduation. He stayed there during his entire career.Fishers main contributions lie in the theory of returns and consumer choice, the theory of interest and capital, and the theory of statistics (index numbers, distributed lags). These contributions are reflected in such works asThe Nature of bang-up and Income(1906),The Theory of Interest(1907),The Purchasing Power of Money(1911) -a great pioneering venture in econometrics andThe Making of index Numbers(1922). In theMaking of Index Numbers, Fisher tested many of the formulas introduced in this chapter by the criteria besides discussed here.The few formulas that got superlative ratings (such as theEdgeworth indexand Fishers ownideal index) include quantity (or price) weights frombothof the time periods or geographic areas involved in the price (or quantity) comparison that is being made. However, the inclusion of two sets of weights tends to look at the construction of such indexes costly, which is the study reason why these highly rated indexes are rarely used. (One ex ception The chest of drawers of Foreign Commerce of the U. S.Department of Commerce calculates monthly quantity indexes of exports and imports using Fishers formula. ) The works cited above established Fishers record as the countrys greatest scientific economist. As such, he served as president of the American Economic fellowship and was a founder and the first president of the Econometric Society. He also played a major role in the establishment of the Cowles Foundation (now at Yale) as a means to nurture mathematical and quantitative research in economics.