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This chapter begins with Frederick Hoffman’s traditional, predictive risk making. It then considers how the disruption of the Armstrong investigations created an opportunity for reformers like Irving Fisher, Lee Frankel, and Louis Dublin to demonstrate how risk-making tools could be reappropriated for the purpose of extending lives. The chapter focuses on Irving Fisher’s idea of a “modern conception of death,” which held that the statistical regularities necessary for prediction should be understood to be mutable through human effort. The rest of the chapter considers this transition from prediction to control. Fisher used hypothetical life tables to make a case for significant public health expenditures and Dublin showed how an individual company’s statistical systems (Metropolitan’s) could be used to justify welfare programs, like medical exams or visiting nurse services, directed toward policyholders. Fisher then worked with Metropolitan and with life insurance medical examiners to found the Life Extension Institute, which played a key role in popularizing the regular medical screening and preventive medicine. The chapter closes with Frederick Hoffman’s unsuccessful efforts to convince Prudential to commit more energies to public health work, his transition toward preventive work, and the dismantling of his library.

Argues that conservation came to encompass human health as part of social and environmental sustainability; stresses the role of Irving Fisher in this campaign; and examines ideas of race suicide and eugenics in conservation. Argues that inter-imperial evidence for connections between racial deterioration, military strength and economic efficiency underpinned the developing human conservation movement towards the end of Theodore Roosevelt’s presidency, but eugenics became important only after the end of that presidency. These themes were presaged in Fisher’s National Vitality which was part of the 1909 Report of the National Conservation Commission.

This chapter discusses Irving Fisher's quest in seeking treatment for tuberculosis, an illness then known to be caused by a germ, and his eventual cure and crusade for a healthier living across the country. Originally an economist, Fisher's calling turned out to be in the field of health. In 1898, he contracted tuberculosis; and his five-year battle with the disease changed him into a health advocate. Fisher believed that purity of diet, regimen, and spirit, were the keys to a long, healthy, and happy life.

This chapter examines the question of inflation during the tenure of Franklin D. Roosevelt. The election of Roosevelt as president of the United States in 1933 had deepened the fear of inflation. A few economists began to argue for the commodity dollar—for a currency that owed its merit not to its gold content but to its constant purchasing power. This constant purchasing power, it was believed, was true currency stabilization. The Economic and Monetary Conference of 1933 hoped to allow the countries that were still on the gold standard to persuade those that had departed gold to stabilize their currencies. The chapter considers the views of John Maynard Keynes regarding Roosevelt's stand on inflation and Irving Fisher's equation of exchange in which he insisted that money supply should be varied in such fashion as to keep prices stable. It also discusses the Federal Reserve System's monetary policy.

The chapter on panic begins—as it must—with Orson Welles’s 1938 War of the Worlds, the panic it inspired, and the scholarly debate about panic that it also began. With War of the Worlds as a touchstone, the chapter turns to other supposed instances of panic in the decade: the stock market crash in 1929, the bank runs of 1933, and Richard Wright’s Native Son, which begins with Bigger Thomas’s panicked murder of Mary Dalton and ends with Wright’s depiction of the hysterical response to that crime on the part of white Chicagoans. Putting these texts together, the chapter argues that for as much as we remember the decade of the 1930s for its populism, it was also a decade in which people felt real fear about what individuals and crowds of people might be capable of when they panicked or otherwise lost control of their emotions.

This chapter examines the role of money and its management, the origins of what is known today as monetarism. It first provides a brief history of money, focusing on the steps that accorded money its separate and distinctive personality, including the establishment of banks; borrowing and the resulting act of money creation; and the realization by kings, princes and parliaments that the creation of money could be used as a substitute for taxes or as an alternative to borrowing from financiers. It then considers the significance of the institutions and experience surrounding money, along with the economic thought and controversy that money has evoked. In particular, it looks at precipitating factors that shaped American attitudes on money in the nineteenth century, including the Greenbacks and silver. Finally, it describes the role of money in facilitating exchange by taking into account the equation of exchange introduced by American economist Irving Fisher.

Chapter 3 moves to the second generation of marginalists and examines how Friedrich von Wieser, Eugen von Böhm-Bawerk, Francis Ysidro Edgeworth, Irving Fisher, and Alfred Marshall conceived of measurement and how they addressed the issue of the measurability of utility. Their respective approaches to utility measurement were highly diverse. Wieser summed the utilities of goods as if they were measurable in terms of some unit. Böhm-Bawerk claimed that individuals can assess utility ratios. Edgeworth suggested the just-perceivable increment of pleasure as a unit to measure utility on the basis of introspection. Fisher proposed adopting a utility unit that could be derived from observable relations between commodities. Marshall took willingness to pay as an indirect measure of utility. Despite the diversity of their approaches, all five economists identified measurement with unit-based measurement. Therefore, just like Jevons, Menger, and Walras, they were also not cardinalists in the current sense of the term.

This chapter discusses hope, how it works, and what people in the 1930s hoped for. It begins with a late science fiction story (Isaac Asimov’s “Liar!”) that reveals how hope works or, at least, how those who do not think much of hope think hope works. It then returns to one particularly ambiguous archive of Great Depression hope: the largely unprecedented genre of self-help books and success manuals. Many of these books reflect the tempered hopes of the decade, nowhere more so than in the pages of Alcoholics Anonymous, published in 1939. The skepticism about hope is also reflected in the politics of the decade. Chastened by the blasted hopes of the Depression, the greatest contribution policymakers made during the 1930s was to develop safety net provisions—unemployment insurance, social security—founded on the belief not that everything would turn out well but could turn out badly.

This chapter describes how the establishment of Yale's Department of Public Health resulted from the creation of the Anna R. Lauder Chair of Public Health with a gift of $500,000 from the Lauder bequest in 1915. George Blumer had chaired a university committee soon after his arrival in 1906 to consider establishing a department or school to provide education in working with public-health bureaus and philanthropic or charitable organizations. Much of the impetus for the committee had come from Irving Fisher, a political economist at Yale, who was interested in the economic impact of disease on society. He felt that Yale was well positioned to serve the public-health movement, given the combined interests of the medical school, the Sheffield Scientific School, and the Department of Economics.

Chapter 7 discusses two early attempts to measure utility empirically. In 1926, Norwegian Ragnar Frisch applied an econometric approach to measure the marginal utility of money. Following a suggestion from economist Henry Schultz, in 1930, American psychologist Louis Leon Thurstone conducted a laboratory experiment to elicit the indifference curves of an individual. Notably, both Frisch and Thurstone intended measurement in the unit-based sense. Most commentators of the 1930s and early 1940s judged the assumptions underlying both Frisch’s and Thurstone’s utility measurements highly problematic and therefore remained skeptical about the significance of their respective measurements. Moreover, after the mid-1930s and the completion of the ordinal revolution, most utility theorists lost interest in measuring utility in a more than ordinal sense. Among the most vocal critics of Thurstone’s experiment were W. Allen Wallis and Milton Friedman, then two young economists and statisticians who had studied at the University of Chicago.