Grand Pursuit

by Sylvia Nasar

  7. William Ewart Gladstone, Gleanings of Past Years, vol. I, 1843–78: The Throne and the Prince Consort; The Cabinet and the Constitution (London: John Murray, 1879), 206.

  8. Angus Maddison, The World Economy: A Millennial Perspective (Paris: OECD, 2001), 265.

  9. Ferguson, Empire, 242.

  10. Dudley Baines, Migration in a Mature Economy: Emigration and Internal Migration in England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), 63, table 3.3.

  11. William Ewart Gladstone, “Free Trade” in Gladstone et. al., Both Sides of the Tariff Question by the World’s Leading Men (New York: Alonzo Peniston, 1890), 44.

  12. Jeremy Atack and Peter Passell, A New Economic View of American History from Colonial Times to 1940 (New York: W. W. Norton, 1994), 468.

  13. Shannon, American Diary, 27 (April 12, 1898).

  14. Ibid., 136 (July 2–7, 1898).

  15. Ibid., 137–50 (July 2–7 and July 10, 1898).

  16. Ibid., 89, 90–91 (May 24, 1898), and 92–93 (May 29, 1898).

  17. Beatrice Webb to Catherine Courtney, Chicago, May 29, 1898, in Norman McKenzie, ed., The Letters of Sidney and Beatrice Webb, vol. 2, Partnership: 1892–1912 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1978).

  18. Norman and Jean MacKenzie, eds., The Diary of Beatrice Webb, vol. 2, 1892–1905: All the Good Things of Life (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1983), 159 (May 16, 1889); Charles Philip Trevelyan to Beatrice Webb, Chicago, April 19, 1898, quoted in Shannon, American Diary, 88, note 4.

  19. Shannon, American Diary, 60 (April 29, 1898), 10 (April 1, 1898), May 24, 1898, and 68 (May 7, 1898).

  20. Milton Friedman, Money Mischief: Episodes in Monetary History (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich 1992), 37.

  21. Henry James, The Ambassadors (New York: Harper and Brothers Publishers, 1903), 257.

  22. Alfred Marshall to Rebecca Marshall, St. Louis, August 22, 1875, in John K. Whitaker, ed., The Correspondence of Alfred Marshall, Economist, vol, 1, Climbing, 1868–1890 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 73.

  23. Henry Seidel Canby, Alma Mater: The Gothic Age of the American College (New York: Farrar Reinhart, 1936), 71, 32.

  24. Irving Norton Fisher, My Father: Irving Fisher (New York: Comet Press, 1956), 21, 26–27, 29–30, 33.

  25. Muriel Rukeyser, Willard Gibbs: American Genius (New York: Doubleday, Doran and Co., 1942), 158.

  26. Edward Bellamy, Looking Backward: 2000–1887 (London: George Routlege and Sons, 1887).

  27. Rukeyser, Willard Gibbs, 146.

  28. Ibid., 231.

  29. Paul A. Samuelson, “Economic Theory and Mathematics—An Appraisal,” in Joseph E. Stiglitz, ed., The Collected Scientific Papers of Paul A. Samuelson, vol. 2 (Cambridge, Mass.: The M.I.T. Press, 1966), 1751.

  30. Irving Fisher to William G. Eliot, Jr., Berlin, N.J., May 29, 1886, in Irving Norton Fisher, My Father, 25–26.

  31. Irving Fisher to Will Eliot, Fisher to Eliot, Jr., Pittsfield, Mass., July 25, 1886, in Irving Norton Fisher, My Father, 26.

  32. Arthur Twining Hadley, Economics: An Account of the Relations Between Private Property and Public Welfare (New York: G.P. Putnam’s Sons, 1896), iv.

  33. Richard Hofstadter, Social Darwinism in American Thought (New York: George Braziller, Inc., 1959), 8.

  34. Albert Galloway Keller, introduction to War and Other Essays by William Graham Sumner, Keller, ed. (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1911), xx, xxiv; Hofstadter, Social Darwinism, 51.

  35. Fisher to Eliot, Peace Dale, R.I., September 1892, in Irving Norton Fisher, My Father, 52.

  36. William James to Thomas W. Ward, Berlin, n.d. [November 1867], in Henry James, ed., The Letters of William James, vol. 1 (Boston: Atlanta Monthly Press, 1920), 118.

  37. Irving Fisher, “Mathematical Investigations in the Theory of Value and Prices (April 27, 1892),” in William J. Barber, ed., The Works of Irving Fisher, vol. 1 (London: Pickering and Chatto, 1997), 162.

  38. Ibid., 68.

  39. Ibid., 145.

  40. Ibid., 4.

  41. Francis Ysidro Edgeworth, review of “Mathematical Investigations in the Theory of Value and Prices” by Irving Fisher, Economic Journal, vol. 3, no. 9 (March 1893), 112.

  42. Alfred Marshall, Principles of Economics, 3rd ed. (London: Macmillan, 1895), 450, 148 (note 1).

  43. Barbara W. Tuchman, The Proud Tower: A Portrait of the World Before the War, 1890–1914 (New York: Macmillan and Co., 1966).

  44. Narragansett Times, June 23, 1893, quoted in Irving Norton Fisher, My Father, 60.

  45. New York Times wedding announcement, June 18, 1893.

  46. Daniel T. Rogers, Atlantic Crossings: Social Politics in a Progressive Age (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1998).

  47. Irving Fisher to Ella Wescott Fisher.

  48. Fisher, Jr. My Father, 69.

  49. Douglas Steeples and David O. Whitten, Democracy in Desperation: The Depression of 1893 (New York: Greenwood, 1998).

  50. Reverend T. De Witt Talmage, sermon delivered in Washington on September 27, 1896, quoted in William Jennings Bryan, The First Battle: A Story of the Campaign of 1896 (Chicago: W. B. Conkey Company, 1896), 474.

  51. Albro Martin, James J. Hill and the Opening of the Northwest (Minneapolis: Minnesota Historical Society Press, 1975), 428.

  52. Bryant, The First Battle, 439.

  53. Paxton Hibben and Charles A. Beard, The Peerless Leader: William Jennings Bryan (Whitefish, MT: Kessinger Publishing, 2004), 189.

  54. Bryan, The First Battle, 485–86.

  55. Ibid.

  56. Ibid.

  57. “Bryan’s Backers Are Shy,” New York Times, September 27, 1896; Canby, Alma Matter, 27; Martin L. Fausold, James W. Wadsworth, Jr.: The Gentleman from New York (Syracuse, N.Y.: Syracuse University Press, 1975), 17.

  58. “Yale Would Not Listen,” New York Times, September 25, 1896, 15.

  59. Fisher to Eliot, summer 1895, quoted in Irving Norton Fisher, My Father, 71.

  60. Fisher to Eliot, July 29, 1895, quoted in Barber, Works of Irving Fisher, 10.

  61. Fisher to Eliot, summer 1895, quoted in Irving Norton Fisher, My Father, 71.

  62. Fisher to Eliot, New Haven, November 1865, quoted in Irving Norton Fisher, My Father, 71.

  63. William Graham Sumner, The Absurd Effort to Make the World Over, in Keller, War, and Other Essays, 195–210.

  64. Fisher to Eliot, summer 1895, quoted in Irving Norton Fisher, My Father, 71.

  65. Irving Fisher, “The Mechanics of Bimetallism,” Economic Journal, 4 (September 1894), 527–36; Irving Norton Fisher, My Father, 187.

  66. Harold James, The End of Globalization: Lessons from the Great Depression (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2001), 24–25.

  67. Walter Bagehot, Lombard Street: A Description of the Money Market (New York: Scribner, Armstrong, 1873), 123.

  68. Fisher, Mathematical Investigations, in Barber, Works of Irving Fisher, 147.

  69. Katherine Ott, Fevered Lives: Tuberculosis in American Culture Since 1870 (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1996), 113.

  70. Ibid.,79.

  71. Irving Fisher, May 1901, “Self Control,” a talk given at the Thacher School in Ojai, California, a high school founded by William L. Thacher.

  72. Fisher to Eliot, Saranac, December 11, 1898, in Irving Norton Fisher, My Father, 75.

  73. Fisher to Margaret Hazard Fisher, Battle Creek, Michigan, December 31, 1904, in ibid., 108.

  74. Irving Fisher, “Memorial Relating to the Conservation of Human Life,” S. Doc. No. 493, at 7–8 (1912).

  75. Irving Fisher, “Why Has the Doctrine of Laissez Faire Been Abandoned?” Address at the Fifty-fifth Annual Meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, New Orleans, December 1905-January 1906.

  76. Perry Mehrling, “Love and Death: The Wealth of Irving Fisher,” in Warren J. Samuels and Jeff E. Biddle, eds., Research in the History of Economic Thought and Methodology, vol. 19 (Ne
w York: Elsevier Science BV, 2001), 47–61.

  77. Fisher, “Why Has the Doctrine of Laissez Faire Been Abandoned?”

  78. Ibid.

  79. Ibid.

  80. Ibid.

  81. Fisher to Bert, Peace Dale, Rhode Island, January 1, 1903, in Irving Norton Fisher, My Father, 84–85.

  82. Irving Fisher, The Rate of Interest: Its Nature, Determination and Relation to Economic Phenomena (New York: The Macmillan Company, 1907), 326.

  83. Ibid., 327.

  84. Ibid., 288.

  85. Ibid.

  V: CREATIVE DESTRUCTION: SCHUMPETER AND ECONOMIC EVOLUTION

  1. Rosa Luxemburg, The Accumulation of Capital (1913) (London: Routledge and Keegan Paul, 1951), 458.

  2. National Bureau of Economic Research, UK Bank Rate, www.nber.org/databases/macrohistory/rectdata/13/m13013.data.

  3. Felix Somary, Erinnerungen aus Meinem Leben [Memories from My Life] (Zurich: Manesse Verlag, 1959).

  4. Oszkár Jászi, The Dissolution of the Habsburg Monarchy (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1929), 210.

  5. Carl Schorske, Fin de Siècle Vienna (New York: Knopf, 1979).

  6. Erich Streissler, “Schumpeter’s Vienna and the Role of Credit in Innovation,” in H. Frisch, ed., Schumpeterian Economics (New York: Praeger, 1981), 60.

  7. Joseph Roth, The Radetzky March, trans. Geoffrey Dunlop (New York: Viking, 1933), 212.

  8. “Opening of the International Exhibition of Electricity at Vienna,” Manufacturer and Builder, vol. 15, no. 9 (September 1883), 214–15; “An Electric Exhibition,” New York Times, August 12, 1883.

  9. Quoted in Roman Sandgruber, “The Electrical Century: The Beginnings of Electricity Supply in Vienna,” trans. Richard Hockaday, in Mikulas Teich and Roy Porter, eds., Fin de Siècle and Its Legacy (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1990), 42.

  10. Richard L. Rubenstein, The Age of Triage: Fear and Hope in an Overcrowded World (Boston: Beacon Press, 1983), 8; Raymond James Sontag, Germany and England: Background of Conflict, 1848–1894 (New York: Russell & Russell, 1964), 146.

  11. David F. Good, The Economic Rise of the Habsburg Empire, 1750–1914 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984), 256.

  12. Gottfried Haberler, Quarterly Journal of Economics, vol. 64, no. 3 (August 1950), 338.

  13. Arthur Smithies, “Memorial: Joseph Alois Schumpeter, 1883–1950,” American Economic Review, vol. 40, no. 4 (September 1950), 628–48.

  14. Marcel Proust, Swann’s Way, trans. C. K. Scott Moncrieff (London: Chatto and Windus, 1922), 73.

  15. Joseph A. Schumpeter, “Preface to the Japanese Edition of The Theory of Economic Development,” in Schumpeter, Essays on Entrepreneurs, Innovations, Business Cycles, and the Evolution of Capitalism, Richard Clemence, ed. (New York: Transaction Publishers, 1951), 166.

  16. Alfred Marshall, Principles of Economics, vol. 1, 5th ed. (London: Macmillan, 1907), xxix, 820.

  17. Joseph A. Schumpeter, “Review of Essays in Biography by J. M. Keynes,” Economic Journal 43, no. 172 (December 1933), 652–57.

  18. “Wills and Bequests,” Times (London), January 12, 1933.

  19. Richard Swedberg, “Appendix II: Schumpeter’s Novel Ships in Fog (a Fragment),” in Schumpeter, a Biography (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1991), 207.

  20. W. W. Rostow, Theorists of Economic Growth from David Hume to the Present, 234–35.

  21. Anthony Trollope, The Bertrams (London: Chapman and Hall, 1859), 465.

  22. Rosa Luxemburg, The Accumulation of Capital (1913) (London: Routledge and Keegan Paul, 1951), 434.

  23. Quoted in Alexander D. Noyes, “A Year After the Panic of 1907,” Quarterly Journal of Economics 23 (February 1909); 185–212.

  24. “The Progress of the World,” American Monthly Review of Reviews, vol. 35, no. 1 (January 1907).

  25. Evelyn Baring Cromer, The Situation in Egypt: Address Delivered to the Eighty Club on December 15th, 1908 by the Earl of Cromer (London: Macmillan, 1908), 9.

  26. William Jennings Bryan, “The Government of Egypt Beyond Definition,” in The Old World and Its Ways (St. Louis: Thompson, 1907), 323.

  27. “Railroad Up Cheops,” Los Angeles Times, February 12, 1907, II.

  28. Quoted in Noyes, “A Year After the Panic,” 202.

  29. “Cotton Crops and Gold in Egypt,” New York Times, January 5, 1908, AFR 28.

  30. Harry Boyle to Lord Rennell, April 21, 1907, in Clara Boyle, A Servant of the Empire: A Memoir of Harry Boyle with a Preface by the Earl of Cromer (London: Methuen, 1938), 107.

  31. “Egyptian Finance,” New York Times, December 8, 1907, 54.

  32. Noyes, “A Year After the Panic,” 202–3.

  33. Ibid., 194.

  34. Desmond Stewart, “Herzl’s Journeys in Palestine and Egypt,” Journal of Palestine Studies vol. 3, no. 3 (spring, 1974), 18–38.

  35. Wassily Leontief, “Joseph A. Schumpeter,” Econometrica, vol. 8, no. 2 (April 1950).

  36. Quoted in Trevor Mostyn, Egypt’s Belle Époque, 1869–1952: Cairo and the Age of the Hedonists (London: Quartet Books, 1989), 154.

  37. Douglas Sladen, quoted in Max Rodenbeck, Cairo: The City Victorious (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1999), 138.

  38. Joseph A. Schumpeter, Das Wesen und Hauptinhalt der Theoretischen Nationalekonomie (Altenburg: Stefan Geibel, 1908), 621, trans. by Bruce McDaniel as The Nature and Essence of Economic Theory (New Brunswick, N.J.: Transaction Publishers, 2010), x.

  39. Ibid., 621.

  40. Smithies, “Memorial,” 629.

  41. Joseph A. Schumpeter, The Theory of Economic Development: An Inquiry Into Profits, Capital, Credit, Interest and the Business Cycle, (1911) trans. Redvers Opie (New York: Transaction Publishers, 2004), 91.

  42. The Norton Anthology of English Literature, vol. 2, The Age of Victoria (New York: Norton, 2000).

  43. Joseph Schumpeter, History of Economic Analysis (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1952), 571.

  44. Alfred Marshall, “The Social Possibilities of Economic Chivalry,” Economic Journal 17, no. 5 (March 1907); 7–29.

  45. Angus Maddison, “GDP per Capita in 1990 International Geary-Khamis Dollars,” The World Economy: Historical Statistics (Paris: OECD Publishing, 2003).

  46. Jeffrey Williamson, “Real Wages and Relative Factor Prices in the Third World Before 1940: What Do They Tell Us About the Sources of Growth?” October 1998, Conference on Growth in the 19th and 20th Century: A Quantitative Economic History, December 14–15, 1998, Valencia, Spain, 37, table 2, www.economics.harvard.edu/pub/HIER/1998/1855.pdf; Michael D. Bordo, Alan M. Taylor, Jeffrey G. Williamson, Globalization in Historical Perspective (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005), 285.

  47. Joseph A. Schumpeter, Capitalism, Socialism and Democracy, 87.

  48. Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, The Communist Manifesto (1848), trans. Samuel Moore, introduction and notes by Gareth Stedman Jones (London: Penguin Books, 1967), 222.

  49. Marshall, Principles.

  50. Schumpeter, Theory of Economic Development, 95.

  51. Beatrice Webb, My Apprenticeship (1926) (Longmans, Green, 1950), 380.

  52. Schumpeter, Capitalism, Socialism and Democracy, 132.

  53. Schumpeter, Theory of Economic Development, 85.

  54. Schumpeter, Capitalism, Socialism and Democracy, 132.

  55. Friedrich von Wieser, The Theory of Social Economics (New York: Augustus M. Kelly, 1927 and 1967).

  56. Joseph A. Schumpeter, “The Communist Manifesto in Sociology and Economics,” Journal of Political Economy (June 1949), 199–212.

  57. Ibid.

  58. David Landes, Bankers and Pashas: International Finance and Imperialism in Egypt (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1980), 57.

  59. Joseph A. Schumpeter to David Pottinger, June 4, 1934, in Swedberg, Schumpeter, 219.

  60. Edwin A. Seligman, Professor of Economics at Columbia, to Nicholas Murray Butler, President of the University, October 22, 1913, quoted in Robe
rt Loring Allen, Opening Doors: The Life and Work of Joseph Schumpeter (New Brunswick: Transaction Publishers, 1991), 130.

  ACT II: PROLOGUE: WAR OF THE WORLDS

  1. Irving Fisher, “The Need for Health Insurance,” American Labor Legislation Review 7 (1917): 10.

  2. Norman and Jeanne MacKenzie, eds., The Diary of Beatrice Webb vol. 3, 1905–1924: The Power to Alter Things (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1984), 204.

  3. Ibid., August 5, 1914.

  4. Ibid., November 4, 1918.

  5. George Bernard Shaw, “Common Sense About the War,” 1914.

  6. Bertrand Russell, quoted in Niall Ferguson, The Pity of War (New York: Basic Books, 1999), 318.

  7. Robert Skidelsky, John Maynard Keynes: Hopes Betrayed, vol. I (New York: Viking, 1986).

  8. John Maynard Keynes to Neville Chamberlain.

  9. Richard Shone with Duncan Grant, “The Picture Collector,” in Milo Keynes, Essays on John Maynard Keynes (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1975), 283.

  10. Charles John Holmes, Self & Partners (Mostly Self): Being the Reminiscences of C. J. Holmes (London: Macmillan, 1936); Anne Emberton, “Keynes and the Degas Sale,” History Today, December 31, 1995.

  11. John Maynard Keynes to Florence Keynes.

  12. Vanessa Bell to Roger Fry.

  13. Sigmund Freud, in Peter Gay, Sigmund Freud: A Life of Our Time (New York: W.W. Norton, 1988).

  14. Friedrich Hayek, “Remembering My Cousin Ludwig Wittgenstein (1889–1951),” Encounter, August 19, 1977, 20–21, and Ray Monk, Ludwig Wittgenstein: The Duty of Genius (New York: Penguin Books, 1991)

  15. Hayek, “Remembering My Cousin,” 20.

  16. D. H. Mellor, “Better than Stars: Portrait of Frank Ramsey,” BBC; D. H. Mellor (1995), “Cambridge Philosophers, vol. I: F. P. Ramsey,” Philosophy 70 (1995), 259.

  17. “National Society to Conserve Life,” New York Times, December 30, 1913; Irving Fisher and Eugene Lyman Fisk, Preface to How to Live: Rules for Healthful Living Based on Modern Science, 2nd ed. (New York: Funk & Wagnalls Company, 1915).

  18. Henry Andrews Cotton, The Defective, Delinquent, and Insane: The Relation of Focal Infections to Their Causation, Treatment, and Prevention, by Henry A. Cotton, lectures delivered at Princeton University, January 11, 13, 14, 15, 1921, with a foreword by Adolf Meyer (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1922).