He's considered one of the most influential economists of the 20th Century. He was a progressive crusader. What was progress to Irving Fisher? Annie L. Cot explains:
In a 1930 speech given at the American Eugenics Society, he expressed his satisfaction about measures of forced sterilization, which had been progressively enacted by many states. "[S]omething real has been accomplished ... There has ... been legislation for sterilizing people who are public charges and who ought not to reproduce their kind; in general, the sterilization has been voluntary. Some six thousands such surgical operations have been performed in California, and probably well over ten thousands in the country as a whole" ([1930b] 1997: 203).Skull and Bones member Irving Fisher at total war with the doctrine of laissez-faire.
The litany was rather repetitive: the objective was to purify humanity from its marginals and its deviants by fighting all forms of laissez faire as far as the "quality" of human capital was concerned.
