"Breed out the unfit and breed in the fit": Irving Fisher, economics, and the science of heredity

American Journal of Economics and Sociology, The, July, 2005 by Annie L. Cot

There is now no reasonable excuse for refusing to face the fact that nothing but a eugenic religion can save our civilization from the fate that has overtaken all previous civilizations.

--George Bernard Shaw

Not only is it in the end more economical to attempt an effort to breed out the disabilities of the human race, but it means a more permanent realization and the elevation of humanity to a higher plane.

--Irving Fisher (1915e: 175)

A particle in Mechanics corresponds to an individual in Economics. Space in Mechanics corresponds to Commodity in Economics. Force in Mechanics corresponds to marginal utility or disutility in Economics. Work in Mechanics corresponds to disutility in Economics. Energy in Mechanics corresponds to utility in Economics. (Fisher [1892] 1997: 129; emphasis in original)

Mechanical analogies. (1) Historiography indeed remembers Irving Fisher's first, and fundamental, contribution to American mathematical economics as being rooted in this table of correspondences. Never had analogies between mechanics and economic theory been taken as far as in his Mathematical Investigations in the Theory of Value and Price, where equations, correlations, and theorems are borrowed from mid-19th century physics.

Looking back at these early professional years, Fisher insisted on this inaugural matrix: "I was a student of mathematical physics and, with youthful enthusiasm, dreamed dreams of seeing economics, or one branch of it, grow into a true science by the same methods which had long since built up physics into a true and majestic science" (1933: 2). (2) In a 1946 address to the Irving Fisher Foundation: "I entered economics from the standpoint of the mathematical sciences, having been a pupil, and later a colleague, in the mathematical department at Yale University of the famous physicist Professor J. Willard Gibbs, often called 'the American Sir Isaac Newton.'" (3)

At that time, Fisher considered that economics could not turn into a science if it did not adopt the schemes of the domain that had made the best use of mathematical tools--mechanics: "The difficulties encountered in getting most professed economists to adopt the methods of physical science made me nearly despair of ever living to see economics become a science in the sense that physics is a science" (1933: 3). Thus his many direct transfers of concepts, methods, (4) and even experimental mechanisms (5) from the field of physics into the field of pure economic theory.

Fisher's sources for metaphors were not limited to mechanics, however. Many other images would turn up in his early writings, borrowed from biology or medicine. "I feel most earnestly the truth of this idea," he confided to Will Elliot in 1895, "that social science is very immature and that it will be a long time before it reaches the 'therapeutic' stage, that the efforts of philanthropists to treat of therapeutics too soon, both delays the solid progress of the humbler preliminary stages of the anatomy and physiology of society and is more likely to lead to evil than good." (6)

A few years later, Fisher moved toward a more radical position, as his repeated calls for such "therapeutic efforts" led him to superimpose other references, borrowed from Darwinian biology, to his basic mechanical model to the point where he proposed to shift scientific expertise on social matters from economics to eugenics and to consider the "science of heredity" as a universal matrix for all social sciences, including economic theory.

As well as Willard Gibbs, William Graham Sumner was a major influence during Fisher's formative years--a "revered master" Fisher claimed in his presidential address to the American Economic Association. Sumner was a fierce defender of social Darwinism and of free trade and, for this reason, was the only major economist who stayed out of the American Economic Association at its launching in 1885.

   My interest in economics was then chiefly an interest in William
   Graham Sumner, the leading American economist and a most picturesque
   personality. Sumner so fascinated me that I found myself spending a
   great deal of time with his department, entirely outside of my chosen
   sphere of mathematics. (Fisher 1941: 185)

It was Sumner who suggested that Fisher write his dissertation in mathematical economics. (7) It was Sumner who was to be the dedicatee of The Nature of Capital and Income. It was Sumner who introduced him to Darwin and to recent Darwinian literature. But whereas Sumner's Darwinism sought to defend a fundamental laissez faire, both in the field of economics and in the field of population, Fisher rapidly endorsed a harsh interventionist position on the latter. The turning point can be dated between 1898 and 1901, while Fisher was being treated for tuberculosis, a period, he would later write, that "greatly changed [his] point of view from that of an academic student of supply and demand as a mathematical problem, to that of a partaker in public movements for the betterment of mankind" ([1892] 1997: 8).