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between appreciation and interest would be complete without verification by facts. In
imaginary illustrations, such as those used in part I, it is easy to make calculations agree
to the last decimal place; but the figures in which we are really interested must come
from actual market quotations.” Most obviously, Fisher's desire for “verification by facts”
seems to repudiate the deductive method of his earlier work. Then, too, one of the
theoretical assumptions that does inform
Appreciation and Interest
— the assumption that
“business foresight exists”—is an assumption different in kind from the theoretical
claim about equilibrium that informs
Mathematical Investigations
. One can simply look at
“modern business” to see that buyers and sellers eagerly watch “every chance for gain,”
and one can find the information market participants use to make predictions about the
future in the “multitudes of trade journals and investors' reviews” that periodically
supply reams of useful data.
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By contrast, equilibrium exists only in theory; the util is
a purely theoretical tool; and, to represent equilibrium, economists must assume the
operation of a desire they can never actually measure.
Even though part II makes it clear that Fisher wanted to test his hypothesis that “an
expected change in the value of money has an effect on the rate of interest”
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against
actual data, the data he cites in
Appreciation and Interest
are by no means straightforward
or simple. Most obviously, these data, which had been collected for a variety of purposes
and which existed in a variety of forms, did not always allow Fisher to perform the
calculations he so painstakingly demonstrates in part I of his text. To glimpse the form
in which the data actually existed in the 1890s, the reader must look beneath the body
of the text to the extensive footnotes that appear on almost every page of part II. For,
the neatly organized tables that Fisher includes—of rates of interest expressed in various
standards (gold, currency, and coin); rates of interest realized on India bonds; rates of
interest in relation to prices in New York, London, Berlin, Paris, Calcutta, Tokyo, and
Shanghai; rates of interest in various cities in relation to rising and falling prices and
wages; and average bank rates before and after the breakdown of bimetallism—constitute
the end products of a set of elaborate procedures that Fisher only acknowledges in the
footnotes. These procedures, which Wall Street analysts now call “data scrubbing,” were
necessary to render the information included in newspaper reports, official documents,
and the other sources Fisher consulted commensurate. This process of commensuration,
which could also be called “cleansing” or “amending,” involved removing incorrect or
inconvenient elements from the available data, supplying missing information, and for-
matting it so that it fit with other data. Fisher does not mention the labor involved in
scrubbing data in the body of his text, but the elaborate footnotes make it clear how
