Comments on John Geanakoplos's 'The Ideal Inflation-Indexed Bond and Irving Fisher's Impatience Theory of Interest with Overlapping Generations'

摘要

It is refreshing to hear an account of Irving Fisher's views on risk and indexation juxtaposed with an account of our modern concerns with the same issues. It is interesting for me to hear this, partly since it shows that many of the issues we worry about today were concerns 70 or more years ago, and thus perhaps that these issues are indeed as deep and fundamental as we now think they are. But I found this history-of-thought presentation most interesting because it clarifies, by starting with simple notions that were on Irving Fisher's mind and moving forward, some of the critical issues concerning the innovations of indexation and Social Security reform. John's paper with Martin Shubik (1990), described here, is really a deep theory of indexation, a theory that I think Irving Fisher wanted to have but could not get with the theoretical apparatus of his day. As evidence that Fisher wanted this, I show a few quotes from his 1911 book, The Purchasing Power of Money.