Most economists are at least passingly familiar with Stan Fischer’s contributions to the field. My experience was more intense.
Before getting in to my personal story, I have a complaint. Prof. Fischer never won the Economics Nobel Prize. The selection committee should hang their collective heads in shame. This failure reflects badly on the prize itself
I never met Prof. Fischer, but he had a profound influence on my career. Let me start with a personal anecdote.
A few months ago I decided to write about the U.S. economy in the 1970s. I began by searching my bookshelves for a specific title: Macroeconomics by Rudiger Dornbusch and Stanley Fischer (1978). Sadly, my first edition was nowhere to be found. Fortunately, I was able to track down a second edition (1981) at my favorite used bookshop, Alibris.com (usual disclaimers).
Stan Fischer
I finished my PhD in 1980. How could a book published in 1978 have had much influence on my studies and teaching? Luckily, I had connections. Prof. Fischer was at MIT. My monetary theory professor, Karen Johnson, got her PhD from that august institution. We were invited to use a manuscript of the book to teach intermediate macroeconomics. Those of us fortunate enough to acquire this gem were either guinea pigs or beta testers. In either case, the book was groundbreaking, introducing simple mathematical models of the economy and illustrating those models with real-world examples.
My first exposure to Prof. Fischer’s work came several years before the textbook’s publication. That was “A Life Cycle Model of Life Insurance Purchases” (International Economic Review, 14:1, February, 1973). This paper integrated elements of finance, consumer theory, and the lifetime budget constraint. It also dealt with the uncomfortable (yet common) assumption that an individual’s utility function was independent from anyone else’s. If that was true, the demand for life insurance would always be zero.
Eventually, this developed into the basis for my dissertation (less successful than I had hoped but good enough to get my union card).
The New York Times’s obituary of Prof. Fischer ran 1,650 words, a remarkably long piece. That seems appropriate to commemorate a long life, full of varied experiences, complete with many significant contributions to economics. RIP, Prof. Fischer. We need more like you.
