FISHER, IRVING

born Feb. 27, 1867, Saugerties, N.Y., U.S. died April 29, 1947, New Haven, Conn. American economist best known for his work in the field of capital theory. He also made considerable contributions to the development of modern monetary theory. Educated at Yale University (B.A., 1888; Ph.D., 1891), Fisher taught mathematics (189295) and economics (18951935) there. In The Purchasing Power of Money (1911), he developed the modern concept of the relationship between changes in the quantity of money and changes in the general level of prices. Including speeches, letters to newspapers, articles, reports to governmental bodies, circulars, and books, Fisher prepared, from 1912 to 1935, 331 documents expounding his plan for the compensated dollara dollar of constant purchasing power, sometimes referred to as the commodity dollar. Rather than defining the unit of money in terms of a given weight of gold, Fisher proposed to define the dollar in terms of a given value of gold to be determined by an index number of commodity prices of a given set of goods. Fisher's crusading spirit led him into many fields of reform, including health, eugenics, conservation, prohibition, and the League of Nations. He also proved himself an able businessman. He devised a card-index file system, put it on the market in 1910, and made a fortune. He was a major figure behind the formation of Remington Rand, Inc. (1926), and served as a director of that corporation until his death. Among more than two dozen books, his most important, in addition to Purchasing Power, were Mathematical Investigations in the Theory of Value and Prices (1892), The Nature of Capital and Income (1906), The Making of Index Numbers (1922), The Theory of Interest (1930), and Booms and Depressions (1932).