Eugenics

by Irving Fisher

Excerpt from Eugenics
But it does not. Nor does eugenics propose to do violence in any other way to any humanitarian or Christian effort. Eugenics does not mean, as some have imagined, compulsory or government-made marriages. Some people have thought that eugenics was some half-baked scheme to breed the human race as we breed domestic animals, and to make a race of pug-noses or blond hair or blue eyes or any other fancy that some master of ceremonies should conceive. Nor does it mean a reduction in the proportion of love marriages. On the contrary, it means an increase of such marriages. Just as soon as men and women come to see and admire, as in ancient Greece, the ideal of physical perfection they will fall in love on that basis, as nature always intended that they should. There will be less interference with love marriages through ambition to acquire property or title.
Eugenics is simply an application of modern science to improve the human race. "But," says the skeptic, "that will take millions of years!" Nevertheless, I reassert that it is easily practical to alter and improve the human race and to do so in a very short time.
This Is The New Optimism Of Eugenics and it is based on solid evidence. Until recently no one realized how fast the race could improve if it would. Even Galton himself, when he first proposed eugenics, was under the impression that we inherit from our ancestors in a way which would make possible improvement extremely slow. He put forward as a theory (what we now know to be incorrect) that each child gets half of its nature from its parents, one quarter from its grandparents, one-eighth from its great grandparents, one-sixteenth from its great great grandparents, and so on indefinitely back, the sum total of those fractions being, when added up to infinity, just unity or the whole inheritance.

30 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1913

About the author

Irving Fisher was an American economist, inventor, and social campaigner. He was one of the earliest American neoclassical economists, though his later work on debt deflation has been embraced by the Post-Keynesian school.
Fisher made important contributions to utility theory and general equilibrium. He was also a pioneer in the rigurous study of intertemporal choice in markets, which led him to develop a theory of capital and interest rates.[4] His research on the quantity theory of money inaugurated the school of macroeconomic thought known as "monetarism." Both James Tobin and Milton Friedman called Fisher "the greatest economist the United States has ever produced."
Fisher was perhaps the first celebrity economist, but his reputation during his lifetime was irreparably harmed by his public statements, just prior to the Wall Street Crash of 1929, claiming that the stock market had reached "a permanently high plateau." His subsequent theory of debt deflation as an explanation of the Great Depression was largely ignored in favor of the work of John Maynard Keynes. His reputation has since recovered in neoclassical economics, particularly after his work was revived in the late 1950s and more widely due to an increased interest in debt deflation in the Late-2000s recession. Some concepts named after Fisher include the Fisher equation, the Fisher hypothesis, the international Fisher effect, and the Fisher separation theorem.