“WIDELY REGARDED AS THE GREATEST ECONOMIST AMERICA HAS PRODUCED”: FIRST EDITION OF FISHER’S STABILIZING THE DOLLAR

FISHER, Irving. Stabilizing the Dollar. New York: Macmillan, 1920. Octavo, original blue cloth. $1100.

First edition of this influential work by “America’s greatest scientific economist” (Niehans, 279).

Writing when gyrating prices were causing political disorder throughout the postwar world, Irving Fisher showed how price levels could be stabilized without government controls over individual prices. “Widely regarded as the greatest economist America has produced” (New Palgrave II:369), Fisher urged that the amount of gold backing the dollar should be varied in order to maintain constant market prices. Fisher made a “stable dollar” his cause in 1911 and pursued it for the rest of his life. In Stabilizing the Dollar he “coined the term ‘money illusion’ to denote ‘the illusion that money is always fixed in value,’ and that it is only the prices of good that change” (Patinkin, “Irving Fisher,” 17).

A highly desirable fine copy.