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In-Depth Information
What initially looks like nothing more than a sequence of representational alternatives,
in other words, contributed to a wholesale revision of the discipline, which turned on
the new importance economists assigned to data
and
the peculiar nature of the data that
a revised economic methodology could use. To see how Fisher reimagined economic
knowledge and why the data modern economists use might be considered peculiar, we
need to follow in some detail Fisher's brief, but consequential, representational journey.
From Mechanics to Quantification: The Analogy Machine
The economic theory that Fisher's dissertation was designed to illustrate involves
value—or, more specifically, the way that desire, which most late nineteenth-century
economists assumed to motivate supply and demand, affected prices and the quantities
of commodities bought and sold.
3
In that period, as now, this theory was known as
equilibrium. Essentially, it stated that, under idealized conditions, the prices that
economic markets establish reflect an exchange equilibrium, or balance, between the
amount of buyers' desire for goods or services and the prices sellers want for those
goods or services. In the language of the day, desire was generally expressed in terms
of “utility,” as Fisher's description of his topic reveals, and the last “point” at which a
unit of any given commodity was still considered desirable was expressed in terms of
its “marginal utility.” What he wanted to illustrate, Fisher explained, was “the depen-
dence of value on utility, disutility, and commodity, the equality of utilities, the ratio of
utilities, the utility of a commodity as a function of the quantity of that commodity
solely, or of that commodity and others, conjointly.”
4
In his prefatory remarks, Fisher
also surveys the kinds of analysis that might clarify these relationships:
How few scholars of the literary and historical type retain from their study of
mechanics an adequate notion of force! Muscular experience supplies a concrete and
practical conception but gives no inkling of the complicated dependence on space,
time, and mass. Only patient mathematical analysis can do that. This natural aversion to
elaborate and intricate analysis exists in Economics and especially in the theory of
value. The very foundations of the subject require new analysis and dei nition.
5
Alluding to the purely verbal method favored by late nineteenth-century political
economists, Fisher dismisses “literary and historical” analysis; then he dismisses mere
“muscular experience,” because it cannot factor in
as abstractions
the Euclidean conditions
in which economic relations must be conceptualized (“space, time, and mass”). “Patient
