Fisher's Introductory Text

摘要

In this essay, James Tobin discusses Fisher's Elementary Principles of Economics (1912). This essay was first published in the American Economic Review: Papers and Proceedings, 87 (May 1997): pp. 430-432. We are grateful to the American Economic Association for permission to republish this essay. Irving Fisher was a dedicated teacher—in classrooms, in books, and in the personal contacts by which he sought to educate presidents of the United States and influential business and government leaders throughout the world. At Yale, Fisher liked to prepare for his students his own written expositions. He even wrote a calculus text for fellow students he was tutoring. Not surprisingly, when he assumed responsibility for the economics introductory course in 1910 he was dissatisfied with existing texts and wrote his own. He and a half dozen other instructors taught from experimental editions for two years before he settled on the published version of Elementary Principles of Economics (1912). It was reprinted ten times, the last in 1932, but never substantively revised. Elementary Principles was not very popular outside Yale. However, much of the material survived, incorporated in the more conventional textbook published first in 1926 and in its fifth and final version in 1948, by Fisher's Yale students and colleagues F. R. Fairchild, E. S. Furniss, and N. S. Buck. Their Elementary Economics was the market leader between the world wars.