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Irving Fisher is renowned as the pundit who declared in October 1929 that stock prices appeared to have reached a permanently high plateau and who, having amassed a net worth of ten million dollars in the boom of the 1920s, proceeded to lose eleven million dollars of that fortune in the crash, which, as John Kenneth Galbraith (1977, p. 192) remarked, "was a substantial sum, even for an economics professor." Along with the Dow-Jones index, Fisher's reputation for understanding financial markets declined relative to that of Roger Babson, the stock forecaster, amateur economist, and founder of Babson College, who presciently predicted the stock market crash of autumn 1929 (and, with less prescience, the stock market crashes of 1926, 1927, and 1928, and the stock market recovery of 1930). An editorial inThe Commercial and Financial Chronicle(November 9, 1929) declared of Fisher: "The learned professor is wrong as he usually is when he talks about the stock market" (quoted by Galbraith 1972, p. 151).

Abstract  This paper examines how economists from David Hume to Irving Fisher have struggled with the applicability of their analyses to those who differed from them in gender, ethnicity, class, or race. Particular attention is paid to how Fisher's discussion of racial and ethnic differences in capital accumulation and time preference changed between The Rate of Interest (1907) and The Theory of Interest (1930), and how it drew on earlier work by John Rae (to whom Fisher dedicated both those books).

Abstract  This essay discusses Fisher's contributions to life extension and to human capital theory.

Abstract.  This chapter draws on the debt‐deflation process of Fisher (1933) as well as on Keynes (1936, chapter 19) and Tobin (1975, 1980) to explore the concept of a corridor of stability, where an economy will be self‐adjusting only for demand shocks small enough to leave it within that corridor.