2. Indifference Curves and a Hydraulic Model of General Equilibrium

Nonetheless, although Samuelson (1966), collecting all his scientific papers preceding his contributions to that 1967 volume in the tradition of Fisher, had twenty-two passing mentions of Fisher on the measurability of utility and in lists of quantity theorists, early mathematical economists, and economists who recognized that expected inflation affects the nominal interest rate, the only substantive reference to Fisher’s dissertation was in 1950 when Samuelson credited Fisher (1892) with introducing economists to the problem of integrability of utility functions in “perhaps the best of all doctoral dissertations in economics” (Samuelson 1966, Vol. 1, p. 75). Samuelson ([1947] 1983, pp. 95, 139n) referred to Fisher’s discussion of integrability without saying where Fisher had discussed it. The only work by Fisher cited in Samuelson’s Foundations was his 1927 essay on the possibility of measuring marginal utility (Fisher 1927; Samuelson [1947] 1983, pp. 173n, 174n, 228n).

Hutchison (1953, pp. 271–273) is generally excellent on Fisher (1892), but errs in including Walras in the statement, “Fisher started with the works of Jevons and Walras, and more especially to his purpose with that of Auspitz and Lieben” (1953, p. 271).

After hearing a few economics lectures in Berlin, Fisher chose not to pay further attention to the German historical school, attending the lectures of Frobenius and Helmholtz instead. He appears not to have met Auspitz or Launhardt (Fisher [1892] made several references to Launhardt 1885, but Launhardt taught in Hanover, somewhat off the beaten track for a grand tour of Europe).

Fisher had more contact than most of his academic peers with economic heresies such as Technocracy in the 1930s (Dimand 1991), so some knowledge in Technocratic circles of Fisher’s hydraulic apparatus is possible.

Fisher’s name appears once in Leeson (2000, p. 337), when Basil Yamey imagines that Phillips would have been amused at finding Fisher (1926) among the “supposed precursors” of the Phillips Curve.

Etienne Antonelli’s praise of Walras and the use of mathematics in economics caused his failure in the 1910 competition for university positions (concours d’agrégation). Outside the university system, at the Collège Libre des Sciences Sociales from 1911 he was able to teach the first course in France on mathematical economics, using Walras’s own abridgement of his Ėléments (later published as Walras 1938), which Antonelli received from Walras’s daughter Aline. Antonelli (1914) was based on his lectures. Antonelli had a university and legislative career after succeeding in the 1919 concours and lived until 1971, but his post-1914 economic publications were nonmathematical (Zylberberg 1990, pp. 83–86).

Morgenstern presumably the later, fuller bibliography of mathematical economics that Fisher appended to his brother-in-law’s 1897 translation of Cournot, rather than the earlier version in Mathematical Investigations. Fisher (1892, p. 120) stated that “Menger, though his writings are not explicitly mathematical, is included for he founded the ‘Austrian School’ which has ever since been allied with the mathematical method.” Austrian or neo-Austrian economists, although marginalist like Fisher, have remained skeptical of the use of mathematics in economics.

Fisher’s dissertation was highly regarded by Charles Roos and Harold Davis, research directors at the Cowles Commission in Colorado Springs before its 1939 move to Chicago (Dimand and Veloce 2007, p. 523), but neither Roos nor Davis influenced the post-1939 Cowles Commission.