Irving Fisher on conservation, national vitality and economic progress

Robert W. Dimand

The European Journal of the History of Economic Thought, 2025, vol. 32, issue 5, 724-737

Abstract: As a member of the National Conservation Commission appointed by President Theodore Roosevelt, Yale economist Irving Fisher wrote a 138-page Report on National Vitality, Its Wastes and Conservation, published in the commission's three volume report in January 1909 and separately as a bulletin of the Committee of One Hundred on National Health. This report provided the most thorough and analytical statement of Fisher's advocacy of increasing the length and breadth of life, reducing mortality and morbidity rates through investment in human capital and through changes in behavior. Fisher's devotion to this cause was motivated by his experience surviving tuberculosis, which he considered “a preventable disease” and which had killed his father. Fisher's Report on National Vitality, attempting to quantify the costs and benefits of such investments and reforms, provided the economic case underlying his best-selling How to Live (which went through twenty-one editions, apart from six to million copies of a condensed version distributed by Metropolitan Life), his Life Extension Institute, his efforts at dietary reform with Dr. Kellogg of Battle Creek, and his support for Prohibition, for a federal Department of Health and for universal health insurance.

Date: 2025
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DOI: 10.1080/09672567.2025.2460222

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