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(1890) followed from Fisher's decision
not
to reproduce the historical account of interest that
the Austrian patiently constructed. Effacing the history of the assumption that money lent out
over a period of time should accrue interest has played a critical role in the naturalization of
modern assumptions about capital.
14. This is part of the title of Fisher's text in its initial publication form, which appeared in
Publications of the American Economic Association
11, no. 4 (August 1996): 331-442.
15. Fisher,
AI
, 16; emphasis in original.
16. Ibid., 9.
17. Ibid., 19.
18. Ibid. Fisher does not bother to prove the “general theorems” that present-value calculations
present because, as he explains, “their proof is accessible in most treatises on interest, annuities,
insurance, etc. ” (
AI
, 20, n. 1). So numerous were the texts that proved and displayed these
“elaborate tables” that Fisher merely gestures, here and elsewhere, to the sources he clearly
assumed his reader would know: “ See, e.g., the ' Encyclopedia Britannica,' ' Annuities ' ” (
AI
, 20,
n. 1). Fisher also refers to “Horner's Method” (
AI
, 27), which was a technique of synthetic divi-
sion used to evaluate polynomials. Horner's Table (or Tableau) provided a shortcut so that one
would not have to make the laborious calculations necessary to produce these results. Fisher
was intimately familiar with such tables and their usefulness; in 1894 he and a Yale colleague,
Andrew W. Phillips, published a five-figure table of logarithms to accompany the geometry
textbook that Fisher and Phillips published in 1896.
19. Ibid., 36.
20. Ibid., 5.
21. Ibid., 35, 37.
22. Ibid., 38.
23. Ibid., 50, n. 6.
24. Ibid., 47, 59.
25. Foremost among late nineteenth-century economists who celebrated empiricism but nev-
ertheless took a polemical stance, regardless of the data, was J. L. Laughlin at the University of
Chicago.
26. “On Method in U.S. Economics a Century Earlier,”
American Economic Review
75, no. 6
(December 1985): 1-12, at 3. Baumol's examples include Richard Ely and Arthur Twining
Hadley (president of Yale and Fisher's colleague). Baumol argues that, as a group, economists
did not embrace empiricism, mathematics, or statistics until World War I.
