18 Facts About Frank Fetter

Frank Albert Fetter was an American economist of the Austrian School.

Frank Fetter notably debated Alfred Marshall, presenting a theoretical reassessment of land as capital.

Frank Fetter was born in Peru, Indiana to a Quaker family during the height of the American Civil War.

Frank Fetter proved an able student as a youth, as demonstrated by his acceptance to Indiana University in 1879 when he was only sixteen years old.

Frank Fetter was on track to graduate with the class of 1883, but left college to run his family's bookstore upon news of his father's declining health.

Chief among the intellectual influences Frank Fetter encountered at this time was Henry George's Progress and Poverty.

Frank Fetter completed his Master of Philosophy degree the same year.

In 1898, Stanford University lured him away from Indiana, but Frank Fetter resigned from Stanford three years later over a dispute regarding academic freedom.

Frank Fetter was the first chairman of Princeton University's Department of Economics and Social institutions.

Frank Fetter participated in a notable debate with English economist Alfred Marshall, both through his 1904 Principles of Economics and a number of journal articles in the American Economic Association's journals and in the Quarterly Journal of Economics.

Frank Fetter contested Marshall's position that land is theoretically distinct from capital.

Frank Fetter argued that such a distinction was impractical, stating that,.

Frank Fetter's stand on this issue further led him to oppose Georgist ideas like the land value tax.

Frank Fetter believed in the subjective theory of value, and thus supported a pure time preference theory of interest.

In "Interest Theories, Old and New", Frank Fetter criticized Irving Fisher for abandoning the pure time preference theory of interest that Fisher had earlier espoused in his 1907 book, The Rate of Interest, a tome which had heavily influenced Frank Fetter.

Frank Fetter discovered that the seeds of error were in Fisher's publication of 1907.

In 1909, at the age of forty-six, Frank Fetter was awarded an honorary LL.

Frank Fetter was a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and a member of the American Philosophical Society.